Banking on alerts (1) -By Magnus Onyibe

It is not uncommon to receive alert from your bank that your account had just been debited for all sorts of charges including unsolicited subscription to the bank’s Digest.

In these very perilous times, how can bank customers, who more often than not, are illiterates, be made to pay for subscription to an in-house publication that is unsolicited for and should be free to customers who wish to avail themselves of the opportunity to interact with the bank? Can anyone in good conscience offer a camera to a blind man, even as a gift, how much less compel purchase?

That’s exactly what the banks that unilaterally debit customer’s accounts to pay for Digest -magazine- are doing to the unlettered ones among their customers. In fact, whatever happened to the simple principle or protocol of contract which is based on offer and acceptance?

Without a doubt, receiving alerts from banks for all manner of deductions are new ways that banks are  applying to milk their clients of billions of naira annually.

At a financially precarious period like this when the economy is fast descending into recession and the average Nigerian is imperilled by the associated hardships,-no jobs, delayed salaries for those still working, spiking costs of living -the unscrupulous and disingenuous theft from unsuspecting bank customers is most unconscionable.

Such an act of perfidy by the banks that appear to be in a manic craze to make profits at all costs irrespective of the pains to their customers, is condemnable and should prick the conscience of bank operators, if they have one.

You can imagine how much N500 monthly subscription would amount to if a bank debits such sum of money from half a million customers every month. By the way, I used a hypothetical number since l could not find useful data about the number of bank account holders in Nigeria from the Central Bank of Nigeria and the Nigerian Deposit Insurance Corporation websites, but l found out that there are about 700 million bank accounts worldwide.

Anyway, N500 debited from the account of 500,000 customers would be a cool N250m raked in from deposits by just pushing a button on a computer keyboard every month.

To make my point more poignant, consider a scenario where an online publisher has one million subscribers on a blog with each paying just N100 a day to browse.

The amount generated would be N100m!

Anybody who has ever sent bulk SMS to family and friends as birthday or wedding party invites can tell how cheap it is, yet banks charge customers such outrageous amount for SMS monthly.

Do the calculation and you will find out how scandalous the downright thievery of customers hard earned money by banks has become.

N15,000@500,000=N7,500,000,000

For folks not familiar with numerics, we are talking about N7.5 billion per month from half a million customers.

Could it be that having been stripped of government funds through the Treasury Single Account policy of the present regime, which used to enable financial institutions make cheap profits by lending government’s money back to government at exorbitant interest rates, banks out of desperation to sustain their over N100bn profit mark, are now seeking all means, hook or crook, to squeeze money out of their customers surreptitiously?

One good policy that Godwin Emefiele, the Central Bank of Nigeria Governor, introduced at the inception of his tenure, a couple of years ago, was to ban the obnoxious fees charged customers for use of the Automated Teller Machines, but perhaps owing to pressure from bankers, the charges have been sneaked back to the detriment of the long suffering bank customers.

A plethora of bank charges in all guises are now the order of the day such that customers could have their accounts that are modestly funded go into debit and amass considerable debt, enough to land banks and customers in courts, in a space of one year due to compounding interest charges accruing into the account via illicit debits.

Commission on Transactions which was also abolished by the CBN under Emefiele’s watch has returned surreptitiously in several mutations like management and maintenance fees, perhaps escaping Emefiele’s gaze. This is not unexpected as the embattled CBN governor has been engrossed in defending the naira which has been heavily pummelled by the volatility in the price of crude oil in the international market now rendering the atmosphere in the financial services sector highly combustible.

Who will fight for the defenceless  bank customers who are not represented at the prestigious Bankers Committee, a forum for bank chief executive officers, and the top echelons of the CBN? How can the bank customers whose interests are not represented on the board of CBN be protected? The truth is that the bank customer has no helper in the instances mentioned above, hence the exploitation that is tantamount to economic rape, has continued unabated.

Admittedly, banks have been compelled to refund unearned income to some customers by the CBN since Emefiele took over, but it appears he would need the weight of the law from the National Assembly to achieve greater success at protecting the interest of customers.

So for the impunity to stop, the National Assembly, as the constitutionally empowered representatives of Nigerian people, of which the banking public, constitutes a critical component, must act now.

Fortuitously, both the higher and lower chambers of the National Assembly have finance committees whose members are very boisterous superintending over the annual ritual of producing  appropriation bill or national budget and then go silent, until the next circle of budgeting activities.

Part of the mandate of finance committees in the legislative arm of government is to check the excesses of financial institutions but until their recent intervention on the contract awarded Systemspec, the company that developed the software being applied in the implementation of the TSA, they have been shirking their responsibilities to protect Nigerians from undue exploitation, perhaps owing to the face-off between the legislative and executive arms of government since inception, about one year ago.

Even then, the legislature’s intervention in the controversial TSA collection platform only complicated matters. Instead of resolving the knotty issues, it left Systemspec in limbo as the software engineering firm has been unable to reap the benefit of her intellectual property, while government is still using the software.

To be clear, I’m not by any means railing against banks making profits as they are in business to do just that, but it’s excessive profits that I’m concerned about. So, obviously, the likes of FCMB, Skye Bank, Heritage Bank and Sterling Bank that made losses or little profits, would be exempted from the excessive profit tax.

Although banks’ non-performing loans have skyrocketed as evidenced by First Bank of Nigeria’s provision for bad loans which is about N120bn from a little over N25bn last year, most banks still made huge profits in the last financial year-and some even hit the N100bn mark.

• To be concluded

Onyibe, a development strategist, is a former commissioner in Delta State