A new report has revealed that Nigeria’s top 10 banks earned N138 billion as at end 2016, up by over 26 per cent from N109.1 billion in 2015. Vanguard reported that the total industry figure is expected to be over N160 billion and over 30 per cent year-on-year increase.
They recorded a significant rise in income from fees they charge customers for use of their various electronic banking services, principally, transaction alerts, Automatic Teller Machine (ATM) services and money transfers among others.
Organized labour said the e-transaction charges are outrageous, and are a form of corporate extortion. They begged the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and other regulatory agencies in the financial sector to intervene before it gets out of hand.
On their side, bank executives said the development was inevitable given the massive refocusing of business models from interest income to non-interest income by almost all the banks in the past two years. According to them, in the current year and in the years ahead the figures will be far higher since bank customers are also buying into the services increasingly.
This development represents a gradual shift by Nigerian banks to non-interest income.
