Contrary to a widespread belief, the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, has stated that its e-Naira was not introduced to compete with digital cash services of commercial banks.

Speaking yesterday at an e-Naira sensitization forum on the campus of the University of Abuja, Mr. Joseph Angaye, a Deputy Director of CBN stated: “e-Naira is not to replace the naira, it’s not to replace the existing payment system infrastructure we already have.

“It was introduced to deepen the financial system, especially the payment system, to address some challenges we saw in the payment system infrastructure and to complement what we already have.

“We are not introducing it to be a competitor to what the banks are doing or other service providers but to provide a platform they can leverage to provide more effective service am sure some of us have been experiencing some challenges from time to time using the payment system but e-Naira will help to promote financial inclusion, reduce congestion in the infrastructure so we are not brought down by downtime registering the number of interfaces that it takes to initiate and complete transaction and giving opportunity to provide additional services that are not even available in the Nigeria system like facilitating payment even when there’s no network.”

Meanwhile, Angaye informed that the apex bank was on the campus of the university as part of the bank’s efforts to promote the eNaira adoption in tertiary institutions across the nation and foster an environment where it would be the preferred option in transactions.

Mr. Angaye said, “Recently we have been engaging with number of universities, actually we should have started from Abuja we’ve been to virtually all the geo political zones of the country to talk to them about eNaira and to partner with them to ensure that eNaira is adopted as a means of financial transactions especially for revenues collection as we as payment”.

He added, “eNaira has really evolved from the inauguration of the eNaira by the former president almost two years ago, we’ve achieved a number of milestones, there have been further developments in terms of improving the functionality based on feedback we have been getting from various stakeholders”.

Prof. Aisha Maikudi, a Deputy Vice Chancellor of UniAbuja said that the university was ready to partner with the CBN to educate the students and other Nigerians on the initiative.