CeBIH Advocates Credit Digitalisation to Boost Economic Activities

Sunday Okobi

The Committee of e-business Industry Head (CeBIH) has called for the digitalisation of payments to boost economic activities.

The group also raised awareness on the various digital platforms to drive credit (loan) facilitation, credit sourcing, and credit recovery for those at the Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP).

At an event held recently in Lagos with the theme: ‘Transforming Credit with Digital Optimisation’, the Chairman of the Committee, Mr. Yemi Atanda, told journalists that, “We at CeBIH have set out to raise the awareness for digital platforms that are driving credit facilitation, credit sourcing, and credit recovery eventually.

“In this event, what we have been able to achieve is to bring all the practitioners together to look at the various challenges that are confronting that aspect of digitalisation, the benefits, and how we can collaborate to solve the problems identified.

“The objective of the committee essentially is to drive advocacy for digital banking in Nigeria and raise awareness among the market participators and regulatory engagement across the industry.

“This event is one of our activities to drive awareness across the industry, and through this event, we have brought together industry practitioners and stakeholders across the globe to discuss a topic that is germane to the digitisation of payment and banking in Nigeria.”

He added: “We believe that averring credit is one of the major engines to drive economic empowerment. As one of the speakers has said, Nigeria is at the level of two to three per cent credit averment at the bottom of the pyramid.

“In other developed countries, that ratio is about 40 percent. So it means that we are very far from the target, and if we don’t make credit available to people, SMEs will not grow, businesses will not be able to expand and we will not be able to create employment, which is supposed to drive our economy.”

The e-business group head said CeBIH’s aim is to drive awareness of the current challenges in the sector, and how to solve them, adding that: “We have been able to do that fairly well. We have stimulated the interest, and from here, other practitioners will help find a way to solve these issues and build a better Nigeria.”

Atanda added that digital banking is a bitter-sweet story, mostly because of the pandemic, as disposable income has been affected, “no funds to spend unlike before, but during the pandemic, we saw a large chunk of users adopting digital channels for the first time because of the restriction on movements, the interaction was limited, so all these led to the people learning other ways of keeping their lives going, hence electronic banking becoming the mainstay.”