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Banks need 22,000 workers for biometric registration

By BusinessNews Staff on April 8, 2014

Deposit Money Banks will need to dedicate about 22,000 of their employees to the biometric registration exercise of their customers, sources close to the project have said.

According to the officials working on the project, over 20 DMBs in the country have combined branch offices of 5,500.

Each of the branch office, it was leant, would need to dedicate about four employees to the exercise. This brings the total number of workers required for the project to about 22,000.

“There are about four bank employees that will handle the registration exercise. Each of them will man specific points in the registration process,” the source said.

Already, the team executing the project last month said trainings were being conducted for a few number of bank employees for the pilot phase of the project.

The suspended Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Mr. Lamido Sanusi, had on February 14 inaugurated the biometric registration exercise on behalf of Bankers’ Committee at the CBN head office in Lagos.

He said that after 18 months of the exercise, bank customers would not be able to do any transaction without their fingerprints.

According to Sanusi, the development represents a milestone in the nation’s financial system and economy in general.

He said the new biometric registration would lead to the issuing of Bank Verification Number, a unique identity for every bank customer, and would help to mitigate fraud, money laundering and other vices in the country.

The pilot phase began on February 14 and was meant to culminate in a Site Acceptance Test on March 31.

The biometric registration was expected to commence on April 1 in only 48 bank centres across the country, mostly in Lagos and Abuja, according to the team handling the project.

As of April 4, there was no indication the exercise had commenced in any of the 48 bank branches.

However, the team handling the project promised to get information across very soon.

Last month, the team said central servers were already being installed at the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System Plc – the company selected by the Bankers Committee to operate and manage the infrastructure for banks.

The team, in a statement, said, “To date, we have installed servers at 21 bank headquarters and have also commenced the deployment and installation of the enrolment and verification devices across 48 bank sites as well as training of the end users at these locations.

“The current testing and training activities at the 48 bank branches will provide the requisite skill set to workers of the banks nationwide and this process will herald the enrolment of customers beginning with the bank staff members. It is our expectation that the experiences gathered from this phase will provide a learning curve to the enrolment officers in the banks and will, therefore, lead to a seamless process when we start enrolling the public.

[Punch]

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