The value of electronic payment transactions in Nigeria jumped by 298 percent to N135.52 trillion Year-on-Year (YoY) in the first quarter of 2023, as cash crunch pushes more Nigerians to online transactions.

The transaction volume which was released by the Nigeria Inter-bank Settlement System (NIBSS) marks a significant increase from the N34.04 trillion recorded in the same period last year.

“The number of e-payment transactions shot up by 984 percent to 4.7 billion in Q1’23 from 433.4 million in Q1’22, while the value rose year-on-year by 298 percent to N135.52 trillion in the first quarter of the year (Q1’23) from N34.04 trillion in Q1’22,” the NIBSS said.

Analysis of data showed that the value of e-payment transactions stood at N42.42 trillion in January but went  down by 4.3 percent, month-on-month,  to N40.6 trillion in February from where it rose  by 34 percent to N54.5 trillion in March.

The volume of e-payment transactions stood at 1.12 billion in January rising by 29 percent, Month-on-Month (MoM) to 1.45 billion in February and up by 46 percent, MoM to 2.13 billion in March.

NIBSS Instant Payment (NIP) channel had the highest value of transactions with N123.72 trillion and the largest volume of transactions with 2.5 billion during the period.

While the increase gives a boost to the nation’s cashless policy, it was masterminded by the cash scarcity emanating from the naira redesign policy – introduced by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) late last year.

The implementation of the policy, which involved phasing out old N200, N500 and N1,000 notes within a short deadline of a few weeks – amid insufficient new notes, created a cash crunch crisis.

The CBN had originally fixed January 31st as the deadline for the old naira notes to be returned to the banks, declaring that they’d cease to be legal tender after then. But the feasibility of the deadline was not attainable, forcing the apex bank to extend the deadline to February 10.

It took judgment from the Supreme Court, annulling the policy, to force the apex bank to allow the old naira notes to co-circulate with new notes.

While the CBN mopped up more than N2 trillion of the old notes from circulation within the period, the redesigned notes were overwhelmingly insufficient. The resulting cash scarcity threw the economy into chaos, forcing a shift to digital transactions as people looked for alternatives to cash payments.

However, the banks are still struggling to contain the increase in online transactions, which has created rising cases of failed transactions.  More than 40 percent of failed online transactions are yet to be resolved.

Banks’ failure to resolve the issues have been attributed to shortage of infrastructure and reduced manpower in the banking sector. This is partly as a result of most technical staffers of the banks leaving Nigeria for better jobs overseas.

The CBN said it is working with the banks and other stakeholders to see that the issues, which are becoming a deterrent to people’s eagerness to embrace cashless policy, are resolved as soon as possible.

There is a really cool project we will all work together in Abia State. Dr Alex Otti, governor-elect of Abia State, approved it this morning. For this project, everyone is an Abian because Abia is the new world. So, everyone is invited. It is a project that has never happened in the history of Nigeria, and it was conceived based on those comments you dropped on this feed. 

Abia – prosperity through enterprise, and God’s Own State. We’re finalizing the concept note and I want every young person to #believe, and that is why I asked Mr. Governor-elect to approve for young people to lead and drive it.

A man who hired me while in FUTO, nine months to my graduation, and put me in a furnished 3-bedroom flat with a Mercedes-Benz and driver, Chief David Ogba Onuoha, Ugoena Abiriba, is coordinating with me. Graduated on Friday, started work on Monday! He believes in talent and the new Abia is a place where talented people will thrive. 

Are you ready for #Abia? The road to prosperity and opportunity passes through Abia. #AbiaIsBetter

Elon Musk has admitted that his move to develop his own AI company is to challenge OpenAI and Google, who have already rolled out AI-powered chatbots.

The entrepreneur said his motive is to “create a third option” in an industry already being dominated by OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Musk made this known in an interview with Fox News. He said he’s thinking of naming the company “TruthGPT” with the goal of creating a “maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe” and that “hopefully does more good than harm.”

The Twitter CEO helped develop OpenAI, but exited the company in 2018 holding no stock. Amid the frenzy created by ChatGPT, which has triggered global AI race, Musk has been very critical of AI development, warning that it poses existential threat to humanity and could be the end of civilization if it is not regulated. He has also criticized OpenAI for deviating from the original plan to make the venture non-profit.

While Musk’s criticisms appear not to change anything, he has decided to create an AI version that will represent everything he had advocated. But he seems late to the party. Musk acknowledged that he is “starting late” which puts him in significant disadvantage to his rivals.

It is not clear how seriously Musk intends to pursue his plan. But the WSJ reported last week that the world’s second richest man is assembling researchers and engineers to start his AI project.

Musk is making the plans while working to transform Twitter, the microblogging app he acquired late last year. He had vowed to free the social media platform from censorship. He said on Monday that the US secret service had access to all Twitter accounts, including direct messages, under previous management.

Musk’s push to promote free speech on Twitter and his decision to develop TruthGPT, suggest there is a grand plan to make the social media platform part of his AI pursuit.

He said Twitter was working on a feature that would allow users to optionally encrypt their direct messages, and that it’s “hopefully coming out later in the month, but no later than next month.”

Musk has previously said that Twitter should offer Signal-style encryption, which is believed to be a way he intends to make conversation on the platform secure.

“If you are in a conversation you think is sensitive, you can just toggle encryption on and then no one at Twitter can see what you’re talking about,” he said.

But encryption may be in addition to his other plan to make Twitter a payment platform. Musk has merged Twitter with X Corp., a parent company he’d registered to bring his companies under one umbrella, in pursuit of his “everything app” called X.

ChatGPT Continues To Accelerate

Meanwhile, ChatGPT is not waiting to be caught as it now moves into the stock playground, LinkedIn News explains.

ChatGPT has begun to insert itself into the world of finance. Not only was the AI chatbot able to distinguish between “hawkish” or “dovish” statements by the Federal Reserve, it successfully determined whether headlines were good or bad for a particular stock, according to two academic papers. The research also shows that the technology developed by OpenAI can perform these and other tasks without being specifically trained to do so. This so-called zero-shot learning capability already exceeds earlier technologies, experts say. Chegg, an educational software maker, is combining quiz answers with GPT-4 to create a study aide called Cheggmate.