Emma Ujah, Abuja Bureau Chief

The e-Naira was not introduced to compete with Deposit Money Banks, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), clarified, Wednesday.

Mr. Joseph Angaye, a Deputy Director of CBN made the clarification at an e-Naira sensitization forum on the campus of the University of Abuja.

According to him, “E-Naira has a lot of benefits, it’s 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.”

He said that officials of the apex bank were on the campus 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, “I would like to say that 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.

“I won’t say we are late in coming here.  Maybe we have probably saved the best for the last.

“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.

“We are coming here with a lot of experience in implementing it and as you know central bank digital currency is a new concept globally and Nigeria is one of the early adopters of central bank digital currency.