The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has asked commercial banks in the country to boycott MTN Nigeria over plans to charge their subscribers for Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) access to banking services from October 21.
CBN Governor, Godwin Emefiele, disclosed this at a press briefing at the just-concluded World Bank/IMF Annual Meeting in Washington DC on Sunday.
The development came after MTN on Sunday sent out SMS messages to its subscribers the planned charges for USSD transactions.
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“Yello, as requested by your bank, from Oct. 21, we will start charging you directly for USSD access to banking services. Please contact your bank for more info(rmation),’’ the message said.
Responding to a question seeking his reaction to the announcement, the CBN governor said the bank would not allow that to happen.
“About five, four months ago, I held a meeting with some telecom companies as well as the leading banks in Nigeria at Central Bank, Lagos.
“At that time, we came to a conclusion that the use of USSD is a sunk cost. What we mean by a sunk cost is that it is not an additional cost on the infrastructure of the telecom company.
“But the telecom companies disagreed with us, they said it is an additional investment on infrastructure and for that reason they needed to impose it.
“I have told the banks that we will not allow this to happen. The banks are the people who give this business to the telecom companies and I leave the banks and the telecom companies to engage.
“I have told the banks that they have to move their business, move their traffic to a telecom company that is ready to provide it at the lowest possible, if not zero cost.
“And that is where we stand, and we must achieve it,’’ he said.
The transactions to be affected by the charges include intra- and inter-bank money transfers, through USSD, among others.
Is it only Mtn that has invested in USSD that they have to be d only Telecom to quickly want charge subscriber for it. Mtn will milk is dry. You don’t talk about direct stealing of customers with failed messages yet Mtn will charge as many times u retry, talk about unsolicited messages, overcharging on normal call rate depending on ur plan. The issue that always bordered me is what NCC is doing in country.