By Dipo Olowookere
The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) has said the value of transactions recorded on Electronic Payment Channels in the first quarter of 2019 was N34.02 trillion.
In a report released this week, the stat office stated the this was carried out in a total of 557.08 billion transactions.
According to the report, the NIBSS Instant Payments (NIP) transactions dominated the volume of transactions recorded, recording 232.82 billion transactions valued at N24.17 trillion in the period under consideration.
An analysis of the report by Business Post showed that 1.47 million transactions worth N1.15 trillion were carried out via cheques, with ATM recording 202.96 million transactions valued at N1.54 trillion.
In addition, 83.76 million transactions worth N633.81 billion occurred on POS, 20.82 million transactions valued at N107.65 billion on the web payment platforms, and 2.93 billion transactions worth N100.69 billion were carried out via mobile payment systems.
On the m-Cash platform, 58,704 transactions worth N183.44 million occurred, e-bills pay had 316,534 transactions valued at N141.65 billion, Remita recorded 1.46 million transactions worth N19.25 billion, NAPS had 10.70 million transactions worth N6.15 trillion, while Central Pay recorded 232,727 transactions valued at N1.60 billion.
Also, in the report by the NBS, it was disclosed in the report that in terms of credit to private sector, the total value of credit allocated by the bank stood at N15.21 trillion as at Q1 2019.
Oil & Gas and Manufacturing sectors got credit allocation of N3.49trn and N2.23trn to record the
highest credit allocation as at the period under review.
As at Q1, 2019, the total number of banks’ staff increased by 0.33 percent quarter-on-quarter from 104,669 in Q4 2018 to 105,017.
Modupe Gbadeyanka 
Aduragbemi Omiyale