Gbenga Adebayo, chairman, Association of Licenced Telecommunications Operators of Nigeria (ALTON), has said that the umbrella body for telecoms operators in Nigeria is yet to agree with banks on how to flesh out the details and modality for payment of the N120 billion debt for Unstructured Supplementary Services Data (USSD).
This is coming after the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) said that deposit money banks had agreed to pay the debt after the intervention of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN).
Umar Danbatta, executive vice chairman of the NCC, had said the issue between the banks and telcos was resolved at a recent meeting between Folashodun Shonubi, then acting CBN governor, the NCC, telecom operators, and the banks.
But Adebayo said that “discussions are ongoing, it has not been resolved. But there is some admittance by the banks that they owe telcos. It is now the mechanism for payment that has not been reached,”.
He said there was progress given that the banks have agreed they owe the banks.
Other telecom stakeholders also confirmed they were yet to get a definitive statement from the banks on how the money will be paid.
Elsewhere, Danbatta had said that the delay in paying the debt could impact the financial inclusion drive of the CBN.
According to him, the USSD service is being provided to the banks, who in turn provide the service to their customers. The question was who should be paying for the service.
“They wanted end-user billing, but we said the service is being provided to the banks, not to their customers. The banks charge their customers for the service, and they are to pay the telcos in the form of corporate billing, which is neat.
“Then along the way, there was a misunderstanding and the debt kept piling until it reached a humongous amount of over N100 billion. Even at that, the service was still being provided to customers by the banks using the telecom infrastructure and the telcos were being paid nothing. This was despite the intervention of the immediate past Minister,” Danbatta said.