Beginning from today, Nigerians who use financial institutions’ unstructured supplementary service data (USSD) platforms to transfer money from one point to another are expected to incur additional charges for such services.
The USSD services include the GTB’s *737#; First Bank’s *894#; Fidelity Bank’s *770#; Access Bank’s *901#; and UBA’s *919# that run on telecoms’ operators platforms. While there is an initial charge of N50 by the bank, which will be retained, customers who use the USSD will be made to pay additional N4.
MTN notified it’s over 60 milion customers in Nigeria during the weekend of the new development via a text message.
The N4 per 20 seconds means that customers will now be charged N12 per minute on every USSD transaction.
Therefore, assuming a quarter of MTN 60million customers (15 million) carry out a USSD transaction in a day, it means that the telecommunications firm could rake in as much as ₦180 million in a day, which could result in ₦5.58billion in a month.
Rumours have it that the decision was actually made by the banks’ chief executive officers who are not ready to make deduction from the N50 they charge for the telecoms firms to maintain the ICT infrastructure on which the platforms currently run. Instead, the banks decided to further charge the customers N4, which will be remitted to the telecoms companies for infrastructural maintenance.
The attention of the Federal Ministry of Communications has been drawn to the viral text message allegedly sent by the Mobile Network Operator MTN Nigeria and other mobile operators notifying subscribers of a N4:00 charge per 20 seconds on USSD access to banking services from the 21st of October 2019.
The office of the Minister of Communications, Dr. Isa Ali Ibrahim Pantami said it is unaware of this development and has directed the sector regulator, the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) to ensure the operator suspends such plans until the minister is fully and properly briefed.
