Yemisi Izuora
The Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System has said that key measures are being taken in the banking industry to ensure efficiency in the electronic payment system and achieve shorter transaction time.
The acting Managing Director,NIBSS, Mr Niyi Ajao, who disclosed this recently in Lagos, said, “The total turn-around-time had been configured at 15 seconds in agreement with banks and processors. However, delayed responses from issuers after this timeout in recent times could cause authorised debits not to return to the terminal before the set TAT.”
Ajao explained that the timeout was the total turn-around-time for a POS transaction cycle from the time it was received from a POS to the time a response was sent back to the terminal.
Some of the remedial steps taken in March, he said, included the adjustment of timeout to 20 seconds from 15 seconds on March 14, 2019 and the adjustment of timeout to 45 seconds from 20 seconds on March 19, 2019.
He said the process was ongoing to disable any issuer with delayed responses beyond 45 seconds with immediate effect to isolate such a bank.
According to him, whenever there was a transaction decline, the system was supposed to reverse the transaction such that a debited cardholder would receive a reversal credit.
Delays on reversal, he added, could be caused by platform downtime; network issues at processor level; and delayed responses and issuer/switch inoperative – processor or when a bank was not available to receive the reversal even when it was transmitted by NIBSS.
He said some remedial steps taken were fixing of platform application issues; network remediation carried out with concerned processor and implementation of a secondary process whereby all reversals for any business day were re-transmitted between 10pm and 12 mid-night to return credit back to cardholders through their banks/processors.