THE Federal Government has disclosed plans to increase the manufacture, production and personalisation of payments cards in Nigeria with new local content guidelines.The new guidelines are expected to be out by last quarter of the year. The guidelines are expected to ensure wider usage and adoption of payments cards in the country and subsequently give the Central Bank of Nigeria's Cash-less economy initiative a lift.This indication emerged in Lagos, through the Minister of Communications Technology, Mrs. Omobola Johnson, who added that the new policy would not onlyresult in an increase in domestic value added to the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) industry, but also boost the creation of low, medium and highly skilled jobs in the ICT industry.Johnson noted that the process would also create a competitive playing field and bring incentives for companies that manufacture, produce or personalise cards.The ICT minister, who spoke at the Card Expo Seminar, stated that government's successful implementation of these priorities should contribute significantly to the growth of the card industry 'as more and more Nigerians use cards as a means of transacting business and obtaining government and other services, which should in turn drive local innovation in this industry.'According to her, Nigeria is at the tipping point of a card explosion, not only because of the CBN drive to reduce the cost and risk of cash payments by promoting cashless transactions via cards and mobile phones, but also because cards are now been used as more than a vehicle for financial transactions.She explained that going by the rate of change and adoption of cards in the country the average adult Nigerian residing in an urban or semi-urban area would carry an average of three to four cards, 'my very crude calculations brings that to about 200 million cards. Add the 90m subscribers on our GSM networks who all have SIM cards (active or not), the 80m or so voters cards that will be issued before elections in 2015, the prepaid utility cards that are becoming the norm rather than the exceptionand we are getting close to half a billion cards in circulation by 2015 or thereabouts.'Citing the United States and Sweden, where cash transactions are just seven and three per cents of transactions done in the economy respectively, Johnson said as the threshold for cash transactions get lower and lower, either through guidelines or changes in customer behaviour, the number of Nigerians that will migrate to card as against cash transactions will also increase.She said the technologies embedded in these cards vary significantly, from the magnetic stripe, to the chip and pin cards all the way to the fairly sophisticated multi-purpose cards that have been adopted for our national identity management scheme.According to her, cards are now seen as not only a vehicle for convenient and safe financial transactions but as means of security assurance and fraud prevention through bio-metric identification and a means by which governments can provide access to government services in a convenient, anytime anywhere and relatively risk free manner.The minister, however, queried the readiness of Nigeria in the provision of adequate infrastructure to cater for the traffic that will be generated from the cards.
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