By Adedapo Adesanya
A telecommunications service provider, Airtel Africa Plc, has announced that one of its subsidiaries, Airtel Mobile Commerce Nigeria Limited, has been given a super-agent licence by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN).
Business Post understands that this final approval followed an earlier approval-in-principle which was given by the apex bank back in November 2021.
Following the final approval, Airtel said it will be able to create an agency network that will service both customers of banks and other mobile money operators in the country.
According to its filing with the Nigerian Exchange (NGX) Limited, where the company’s shares are listed, the company said, “The licence allows us to create an agency network that can service the customers of licenced Nigerian banks, payment service banks and licenced mobile money operators in Nigeria.”
One of the minimum requirements for obtaining a super-agent license in Nigeria is that the recipient must “have a minimum shareholders’ fund, unimpaired by losses of N50 million, and Airtel meets this requirement.”
This means the company will now be able to further compete in the financial services space which is seeing keenly contested players with significant growth in Africa’s largest economy expected due to high levels of internet penetration combined with being one of the largest digital economies on the continent.
However, the super-agent licence is different from the payment service bank (PSB) license that Airtel received last year for the operations of SMARTCASH Payment Service Bank Limited.
The CBN, as part of efforts to reach at least 80 per cent financial inclusion, is using telcos’ reach to cover the large quota of the population that is either currently unbanked or under-banked and super-agent banking is one of the ways being explored.
Airtel Nigeria will now join MTN Nigeria as one of the telcos with a super-agent licence. Its rival got the CBN received its authorisation back in 2019.
Dipo Olowookere