CBN Directs Banks To Geo-Tag Payment Terminals Within 60 Days To Avoid Transaction Failure

THE Central Bank of Ni­geria (CBN) has issued a directive to all com­mercial banks, microfinance banks, mobile money op­erators, and other licensed participants in the Nige­rian payments ecosystem, mandating full migration to the ISO 20022 standard for payment messaging by October 31.

ISO 20022 is a global stan­dard for financial messaging — that is, the format and structure of electronic data exchanged in payments, securities, trade services, cards, and foreign exchange transactions.

In a circular signed by Rakiya Yusuf, director of the payments system supervi­sion department, CBN re­minded all licensed opera­tors that ISO 20022 is now the standard for payments messaging both domesti­cally and internationally in line with SWIFT’s global migration timeline

The apex bank added that compliance validation exercises will commence from October 20.

“All payment transaction messages exchanged do­mestically or internationally must be formatted in ISO 20022 in line with CBN and SWIFT specifications,” the statement reads.

“All Institutions shall en­sure complete and accurate population of mandatory data elements, including payer/payee merchant/ agent identifiers, and trans­action metadata. identi­fiers.”

Under the new directives, all payment terminals are required to have native geo­location services enabled, with double-frequency GPS receivers for a reliable geo-location service.

“All payment terminals must be registered with a Payment Terminal Service Aggregator (PTSA) with ac­curate latitude/longitude coordinates indicating the Merchant/Agent place of business/service and sta­tus,” CBN added.

“All Operators (PTSAS, PTSPS, PTADs, Acquirers) are to ensure their Pos ter­minals and applications are duly certified by the na­tional central switch to align with the listed standards. “As part of the Certification process, all payment termi­nals must have the National Central Switch SDK for Geo­location monitoring and Geofencing implemented within the libraries of its PoS Application.

“Android Operating Sys­tem (OS) v10 is the mini­mum OS requirement across all terminals to ensure com­patibility and seamless in­tegration with the National Central Switch Geolocation SDK.