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Nigeria: First Bank to Deploy Customer Identification System
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This Day (Lagos)
14 May 2008
Posted to the web 15 May 2008
Lagos
The First Bank of Nigeria Plc is set to deploy the latest Customer Identification System (CIS) across all its branches nationwide from Nirph Digital West Africa Limited, a leading information technology company in Nigeria.
The actual deployment of the product is expected to begin before the end of this month. About five other banks, some public agencies and a state government are also in the process of evaluating the product.
With this development, First Bank becomes the first financial institution in the Africa and among the first few in the world to deploy this solution that would enhance its customer service delivery and checkmate identity fraud.
It will also ensure that the bank conforms to Know Your Customer (KYC) standard requirement by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) which would ultimately position the bank as being in the forefront if eliminating multiple identity fraud within the Nigerian banking industry.
Nirph CIS, according to Mr. Bamidele Asorona, chief executive officer of Nirph Digital West Africa Limited, said the product is specifically designed to speed up transactions, reduce fraud and improve customer satisfaction. CIS, which also contains an Afis fraud detection database that enables financial institutions to immediately identify fraudsters, eliminates multiple identities and identify fraud across the financial sector.
According to a report by the Nigerian Deposit Insurance Corporation, the average bank fraud currently stands at about N10 billion every month. But with the introduction of the product into the Nigerian market, this development is expected to be drastically controlled if the industry embraces the product as quickly as possible.
Asorona, who spoke last week during his company's participation at this year's African Banking Conference and Expo in Lagos, said the system is composed of a highly quality fingerprint scanner and special software that extracts the fingerprints characteristics and compares it to the fingerprints in the known fraudster database. When a match is found, the system sends the information to the CIS cashier application which displays the fraudster's photo, next to the individual's photo and all the persons previously captured personal information. This person is identified using his fingerprints, the photo serves only as an additional means to visually identify the individual.
Asorona said the company decided to launch this product into the Nigerian market in order to lay a solid foundation for the prevention of crime and criminal activities in the country.
He said although governments at all levels spend huge amount of money on the development of infrastructure in the country, but an important aspect of it that is being left out is the issue of identity which is why it is easier for some people to commit crimes many times without the government having a database for such activities.
Asorona noted that what has helped the advanced countries to reduce the rate of criminal activities is the effective development of identity management which has made it possible for criminals to be identified more easily.
According to him, all the existing means of identification like driving licence, passport, identification cards among others are still vulnerable to manipulations, but fingerprint is natural which make not to be as vulnerable as other means of identification.
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Asorona described CIS as the most revolutionary identity tool in the world today, especially in the banking industry, and this underlines the dynamism of First Bank in setting the pace for new standard in the country.
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