Nigerians may no longer be able to use the Unstructured Supplementary Service Data, USSD, short code for financial transactions from Monday, March 15, Telecommunication Operators, Telcos say.
According to the telcos under the aegis of Association of Licensed Telecommunications Operators of Nigeria, ALTON, who have threatened to withdraw the USSD service from the banks, says it is due to the insensitivity of the banks to pay an accumulated debt of N42 billion, which have accrued in the last eight months.
The telcos claimed that since the USSD Pricing determination by the Nigerian Communications Commission, NCC, which resulted in a price review of USSD service by its members, banks are yet to pay them the accumulated USSD transactions costs.
As contained in a statement jointly signed by the ALTON Chairman and Head of Operations, Gbenga Adebayo, and Gbolahan Awonuga, respectively on Friday, the body said it is aware of the letter issued by the Minister of Communications and Digital Economy to the Central Bank of Nigeria, seeking a resolution to the on-going dispute between the banking sector and the telecoms sector over the appropriate methodology to use to charge for USSD services.
It said the NCC’s updated pricing methodology for USSD services for financial transactions in Nigeria explicitly restricts Mobile Network Operators from charging the end-user for the services and mandates the banking sector to enter into negotiations to settle outstanding obligations, and agree on individual pricing mechanisms to be applied going forwards.
“The background to this problem was that in order to accelerate the adoption of financial services on USSD, the Financial Service Providers (FSPs) partnered with our members to zero-rate the USSD access to end-users, while they bore the cost for the provision of service. Based on this arrangement, the banks took on the responsibility of billing customers and paid our members for use of the USSD infrastructure from the service fees deducted from the customer’s bank account.
“Following the issuance of the USSD Pricing determination by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) which resulted in a price review of USSD service by our members, the banks decided that they would no longer pay for USSD service delivered to their customers and requested our members to charge customers directly for use of the USSD channel,” the body explained.
