The Association of Bureaux De Change Operators of Nigeria (ABCON) has urged the CBN to democratise and centralise the operation of its members by granting them autonomy to go digital.
ABCON President, Alhaji Aminu Gwadabe, said this in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Sunday in Lagos.
Gwadabe said that the appeal became necessary against the backdrop of recent CBN planned reforms on BDCs, urging them to be tech savvy.
“In view of the above, we call on the CBN to diversify our scope of operation and business model from cash based to less cash and digital platforms.
“ABCON, in the launch of its vision for BDCs digitisation through its exchange rate platform (http://naijabdcs.com”>naijabdcs.com),unveiled in 2018, has long prepared its members to embrace technology.
“It is also important to note that ABCON has spent several millions on IT research and development, designs, implementation of various layers of automation of the business transformation process from manual to digital.
“Our members, through automation, now have transactions monitoring systems with installed IT office equipment and internet in their location.
“Our members now record their transactions on AWS I -Cloud real time on line and extract their daily reports for return rendition, online real time interface with the CBN,” Gwadabe said.
The ABCON boss said that sometime in 2019, BDCs were integrated into the Nigerian Inter Bank Settlement System (NIBSS) clients BVN verification and validation platform in carrying out transactions with their members.
Gwadabe said that BDCs, through the collaboration of ABCON and the Nigerian Fraud Intelligence Unit (NFIU), have registered on the GoAML platforms and Nil-returns platform for the rendition of their suspicious and cash transactions threshold to the NFIU in compliance with their AML/CFT obligations.
‘We have also ensured that each of us execute compliance undertaking and appointment of a Compliance Officer.
“ABCON also constantly trains and retrains, sensitises its members with regulators and security agencies as resource persons.
“ABCON as a custodian of regulation and auto regulatory organisation believes that the BDCs pose the most effective, transparent pass through effect and transmission mechanism of the CBN foreign exchange policies.
“We have achieved convergence of rates in 2006, 2009 and 2018 to 2020 before the outbreak of COVID -19 in 2020,” Gwadabe said.
The ABCON chief said that it was in the light of the verifiable feats earlier mentioned that it was calling on the apex bank to grant a no- objection approval to various correspondence to it to grant BDCs the autonomy to embrace digital payment to the sub sector to achieve rate convergence.
He listed the benefits of the autonomy to include, but not limited to the following:-
“First, it will lead to a true market rate discovery.
“Secondly, it will enhance the achievement of the Federal Government’ harmonised foreign exchange rate policies.
“Thirdly, it will make the BDCs transactions monitoring system effective and in conformance with their compliance obligation to statutory and regulatory requirement.
“Fourthly, it will harmonise and centralise the market,thus making the BDCs the moderating and correcting mechanism for the market.
“Fifthly, it will create additional employment to the over 40,000 employees directly and indirectly in the BDCs sub sector,” Gwadabe said.
He said that the autonomy would usher in transparency, accountability and ease of supervision of transactions in the BDC subsector of the FX market.
