The Central Bank of Nigeria has contracted Dermalog Identification Systems to deploy a biometric technology throughout the country’s banking system. In particular, this project, worth more than $50 million will see the introduction of biometric ARMs, point of sale machines, as well as biometric fraud detection systems.“This is not in any way a lack of confidence in the government’s identity card process, we will do this and will continue to work with the national identity card team when the time comes, but the central bank has to continue taking the lead in this matter,” Sanusi said in the ThisDay report.
“Whatever happens to NIC, we will try to roll in what we have here, but we took a decision almost two years ago that it is not wise to continue waiting for the bigger project to happen and we have to as it were take our own destinies into our own hands and start our own KYC and an identification database.”
Nigeria's Central bank announced earlier this year that it was set to introduce biometric authentification for POS and ATM transactions by 2015.
Nigeria has recently initiated many biometric-based systems for its citizens. Most recently, The Nigerian National Identity Management Commission and MasterCard announced the introduction of 13 million MasterCard-branded National Identity Smart Cards, which include electronic payment capabilities, as well as unique National Identification Numbers which include biometrics.
As reported previously in BiometricUpdate.com, in 2012, the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) of Nigeria announced its proposal to capture the biometrics of every Nigerian and issue national identity numbers within a period of only 30 months. In January of this year, the National Population Commission announced it had started a comprehensive biometric capture exercise.
Later in 2012, Chairman of the National Population Commission, Festus Odimegwu, said other government agencies (such as the NIMC) which had been collecting biometric data will pool that information with the NPC. The chairman also controversially suggested that any Nigerian who is not captured in this most recent demographic survey will not be recognized as a citizen of Nigeria after the 2016 national population census.
