By Bank customers are soon going to be unable to use Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) short code to do financial transaction, the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has granted telecommunications companies approved to suspend the USSD service to 18 banks.
The suspension was as a result of debt owed telecoms operators by Deposit Money Banks (DMBs), which has lingered for so long with just only four complying with the NCC directive to pay their debts as at December 2024.
According to the NCC, debt, has accumulated to over N200 billion in the last four years adding that the suspension the suspension would be for only two weeks, designed to notify bank customers who still use the USSD code for their financial transactions.
It would be recalled that the telecoms operators had even written off 40 per cent of the accumulated debt and asked the banks to pay 60 per cent of the debt, however some are yet to meet their obligations.
Before the latest development, several stakeholders’ intervention meeting held between the NCC, the telecos and the Centra Bank of Nigeria had not yielded not result.
There are indications that after the two weeks of suspension, telcos will completely withdraw the USSD service from banks thereby throwing panic into the banking industry.
