Many Nigerians experienced declined transactions on Point of Sales terminals all over the country as PoS transactions failure rate hit 23 per cent on Friday afternoon, the first day of Eid-El Kabir.
Live transaction updates obtained from the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System showed that about 309,016 attempts to make payments on PoS terminals were not successful out of a total of 1.349 million transactions conducted as of 3.16pm.
According to the data, the issuer banks contributed the most to the failure of the transactions as 68,697 of the failed transactions were attributed to errors on their platforms.
This was closely followed by errors emanating from the customers, which accounted for 37,034 of failed payments.
The statistics indicated that 33,260 errors emanated from the acquirer banks and 19,728 errors, which originated from the processors, also contributed significantly to the failed funds transfer and payments carried out by retailers and merchants.
However, the updates showed that the NIBSS platform and security breach did not contribute to the unsuccessful payments.
Friday being the first day of the Eid-El-Kabir celebration, electronic payments on PoS peaked at 9.35am, recording a volume of 17,465, as Muslims made last minute purchases to celebrate Eid-El Kabir.
Meanwhile, bank customers carried out over one million transactions on NIBSS Instant Pay platform on Friday, the live updates showed.
NIP, which is an online real-time product that facilitates instant digital payment on an account, hit exactly 1,765,098 transactions and recorded a low failure rate of 1.07 per cent as of 3.16pm on Friday.
NIP transactions peaked at 8.30am and with a total of 30,326 payments carried out at the time.
Most of the unsuccessfully funds transfer was as a result of unavailable beneficiary bank, which contributed to 13,333 failed transactions and invalid account number which accounted for 2,962 failed payments.
The data showed that other reasons for failed NIP transactions were transfer limit exceeded and account name mismatch, among others.
The President, Association of Mobile Money Agents in Nigeria, Mr Victor Olojo, recently explained that though some of the failed transactions stemmed from network disruptions, technology glitches contributed significantly to the decline transactions.
Olojo observed that declined transactions were high during peak transaction periods and festive seasons.
He added that operators needed to ensure that competent web solutions and apps were deployed on payment devices..
