The Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, yesterday, said it would officially launch the 2nd phase of biometric details of all bank customers in the country come February 14, 2014.

The apex bank said it also allocated N132billion of SMEs funds to women entrepreneurs in the country.
Governor of the CBN, Mallam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, who disclosed this at the CBN and World Economic Forum meeting in Abuja, said the second phase would ensure full capture of biometric details of all banks customers nationwide in less than a year.

The project, according to him, is expected to provide a centralized platform through which banks might enrol and uniquely verify the identity of each customer through ‘know your customer,’ KYC, purposes, perform credit checks, verify customer’s integrity and authenticate customers from a point of transaction device.

Sanusi said the project represented a major landmark in the Bankers Committee’s efforts at promoting financial inclusion drive, expanding banking services, access to credit and more importantly, dealing with money laundering and other financial industry problems.

He explained that the CBN and the banks decided to embark on the project as a proactive strategy to enhance the integrity of banking services delivery by building a reliable customer identification system which would help in complementing the other projects being embarked upon by various government agencies.