Millions of Nigerians will lose access to the Unstructured Supplementary Service Data, USSD, of nine banks, following the planned stoppage of the service by telecommunication firms as a result of indebtedness to the tune of N160 billion.
In a notice by the Nigerian Communications Commission NCC, the telcos will cut off the USSD access of these banks by Monday, January 27, 2025, if a substantial percentage of the debt is not cleared.
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The USSD has enabled many Nigerians without access to smartphones, to make cash transactions, as it is a universal channel that makes financial services easy.
However, the inability of commercial banks to settle payment dispute with telcos since 2019 has continued to disrupt Nigerians’ access to the USSD.
With this, the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN and the NCC on December 20, 2024, issued a memo, ordering banks to pay 85% of the N200 billion outstanding debts on USSD servicing from February 2022, as only 9 of the 18 indebted banks, cleared over 90% of their debts, by the December 31, 2024 deadline, hence, reducing the total debt to N160 billion.
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