The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has made good of its promise and unveiled *997# as the Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) code for transacting Nigeria’s digital currency, eNaira. CBN is launching the USSD code 10 months after the unveiling of the eNaira.
What’s more
Nigeria’s apex bank believes that the use of the USSD code would encourage “financial inclusion, support poverty reduction, enable direct welfare disbursement to citizens, support a resilient payments ecosystem, improve availability and usability of central bank money.”
By the numbers
Since the launch of the currency in October 2021, eNaira, Africa’s first digital currency has registered 840,000 downloads and N4 billion transactions across the 270,000 active wallets consisting of 252,000 consumer wallets and 17,000 merchant wallets.
What to watch
To achieve its set goal, CBN is banking on the country’s 81 million adults using mobile phones, and 150 million mobile subscribers to transact with the digital currency.