Cashless Nigeria by Force, by Fire!

I was recently reviewing a CBN report on Cashless Nigeria and it is scary to know that 65% of Cash in Circulation is outside the banking system. I guess everything the CBN can do to cajole those who have ecstasy at the sight of cash wouldn’t work. Time we did it differently. What will happen if the CBN changes the Naira design with 1 year for everyone to comply or the Ghana-must-go of cash becomes an anthropological artifact? The whole cash would have to come to the banks to be changed, isn’t it?
What if the CBN puts a cap on the amount you can get back as cash but the rest has to be paid into some accounts, even if it is a mobile wallet? What if there is no penalty for pay in but there is for cash out?
We have done even crazier things in Nigeria and we can pull this off. The whole Cashless stuff is kind of tiring when you consider the efforts guys have put in but then nobody said it’s gonna be easy. The rest of the country is going to be on Cashless in few months and I hope we can drag them kicking and screaming into the new dispensation.

Author: Adedeji Olowe

Adédèjì is the founder of Lendsqr, the loan infrastructure fintech powering lenders at scale. Before this, he led Trium Limited, the corporate VC of the Coronation Group, which invested in Woven Finance, Sparkle Bank, Clane, and L1ght, amongst others. He has almost two decades of banking experience, including stints as the Divisional Head of Electronic Banking at Fidelity Bank Plc. He drove the turnaround of the bank’s digital business. He was previously responsible for United Bank for Africa Group’s payment card business across 19 countries. Alongside other industry veterans, he founded Open Banking Nigeria, the nonprofit driving the development and adoption of a common API standard for the Nigerian financial industry. Beyond open APIs, Adédèjì works deeply within the fintech ecosystem; he’s the board chairman at Paystack. Adédèjì is a renowned fintech pundit and has been blogging on technology and payments at dejiolowe.com since 2001.

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