Business
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The Nigeria Deposit Insurance celebrates its 25 anniversary with a warning to Nigerians to be wary of wonder banks
| By Anayo Ezugwu | Oct. 6, 2014 @ 01:00 GMT |
THE Nigeria Deposit Insurance Corporation, NDIC, has warned the Nigerian public to be wary of wonder banks that is offering mouth-watering deposit interests but indeed are out to defraud unscrupulous members of the society. Umaru Ibrahim, managing director of the corporation, gave the warning at a press briefing in Abuja, on Thursday, September 25, to mark its 25th anniversary.
“The problem of wonder banks are emerging again and the public must be careful about anyone coming to them and promising very high deposit interests which could be at the detriment of the deposit itself. If someone comes and promises a very high interest in order to take your money. You should be careful because his real intention might be to run away with your deposit,” he said.
Ibrahim regretted that in the current efforts to sanitise the micro finance banking sub-sector, his officials couldn’t even trace the addresses of some of them, adding, that they just open an office, collect deposits from unsuspecting members of the public for a few months and then disappear.
The NDIC boss disclosed that about N9. 581 billion had been paid to insured depositors of failed banks since 1994 to date. “A cumulative amount of ¦ 6.825 billion was paid to 528,277 insured depositors of the 48 DMBs in-liquidation as at August 31, 2014. While for the 186 closed MFBs, the cumulative amount of N2.756 billion had been paid to 80,059 verified depositors as at 31st August, 2014.”
He admitted that a major challenge in the efforts to pay insured depositors was their failure to come out and make claims as expected. Ibrahim urged depositors of failed banks to take advantage of the provisions by the NDIC to collect their deposits. He said the organisation was working towards including Mobile Money Operators, MMOs, in its deposit coverage with a view to securing the funds of their subscribers. “In order to engender confidence of the public in subscribing the products of the MMOs, the NDIC has considered as imperative the extension of deposit insurance to the individual subscribers of the MMOs in the form of pass-through deposit insurance. The framework for making the pass-through insurance scheme operational is currently being finalised by the Corporation,” he said.
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