What Nigeria is learning from India

ICYMI: Nigeria has joined China, Russia, Iran, India, and Turkey by launching a domestic card scheme. Our central bank governor says the card scheme—AfriGo—will cater to local peculiarities that the existing card products have failed to cater to. “Local peculiarities” is a euphemism for the central bank’s mismanagement of forex.

What this means is that in addition to being issued Visa, Mastercard, and Nigerian-born Verve debit cards, Nigerian cardholders can now ask their banks for AfriGo debit cards. It will be Africa’s first central bank-driven, domestic card scheme. Besides reducing banks’ demand for forex, the payment scheme should help enforce data sovereignty; enable locally relevant products; and make card payments more affordable for Nigerians. Taken at face value, AfriGo will increase the competition between card networks, which is supposedly a good thing.

ile transactions accounted for 78% of instant payments made through Nigeria’s Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS)—this without mobile money in the mix. Rather than double down on supporting mobile payments to reach scale, the central bank has chosen to add another front in its fight for “financial inclusion”.

We’ve heard this story before. And while every odd policy you read in the news from Nigeria’s central bank is supposed to enhance financial inclusion, Nigeria’s AfriGo card scheme is yet another manifestation of how Nigeria’s central bank is involved in the Nigerian payments space as a Regulator, Operator, and Catalyst and may perhaps reveal who Emefiele is taking lessons from.

Saving dollars

The main appeal of AfriGo lies in its promise to reduce the fees banks have to pay (in USD) to international card associations like Mastercard and Visa. Card association fees are usually charged as a percentage of volume or as a flat fee per transaction. Some apply to all transactions, while others apply to specific situations. The fees may be bothersome to pay, and I’m sure any self-respecting bank CEO would rather not pay these fees. But they are relatively inexpensive—compared to the profit banks net from facilitating card payments.

Here’s a table of some of the most common fees charged by Visa and Mastercard.

Visa fees

Mastercard fees

Domestic card schemes are only appealing in Nigeria because forex is scarce and the central bank (responsible for managing foreign reserves) is furiously casting about for a solution—even though, so far, it has only resorted to slapping band-aids on minor forex leaks while ignoring the major holes that drain Nigeria’s forex.

Financial inclusion is often the raison d’être, the justification, thesis and aspiration for any suitable raft of financial sector programs from financial regulators, especially in emerging markets. While it is easy to demonstrate that a domestic card payment association will save banks some money, it is not easy to predict how, or whether it might reduce transaction costs for cardholders and the CBN has not offered any explanations.

Alternatively, banks may find customer cost-saving proposals (from central banks) like zero-transaction fees unattractive, since they won’t make any money from the service. According to an IIT-Bombay study, this is precisely the situation in India, where despite mandates, card-issuing banks prefer to give their customers Visa and Mastercard debit or credit cards.