Customers of Access Holdings plc, Guaranty Trust Holding Plc, and United Bank for Africa Plc (UBA) in Nigeria made a combined total of N7.19 trillion in Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) transactions in 2022.
This is according to data sourced from the banks’ full-year financial statements submitted to the Nigeria exchange.
A breakdown shows that while Access Holdings’ USSD transactions increased by 26.3% to N2.4 trillion in 2022 from N1.92 trillion in 2021, GTCO experienced a 22% decline in its USSD transactions, dropping to N3.21 trillion in 2022.
On the other hand, UBA reported an increase in its USSD transactions, rising from N1.15 trillion in 2021 to N1.56 trillion in 2022.
In its presentation to investors and analysts, GTCO attributed the decline to the introduction of 2-factor authentication and the negative impact of a N6.98 flat fee on the volumes and values of transactions made using USSD.
The bank stated that these factors led to a shift in customer behaviour towards GTWorld to complete their NIBSS Instant Payments (NIP) and other electronic payments.
Nevertheless, GTCO experienced a growth of 1% in the volume of USSD transactions, reporting 972 million in 2022 compared to 966.9 million in 2021.
The bank’s mobile banking transactions saw a substantial increase of 28%, reaching N32.8 trillion in 2022 from N25.6 trillion in 2021, with a growth rate of 18% in the number of mobile banking transactions from 414.1 million to 490.6 million in 2022.
In contrast, internet banking transactions decreased by 6% to N2.62 trillion in 2022 from N2.78 trillion in 2021, with a significant decline of 20% in the volume of internet banking transactions from 11.1 million to 8.8 million.
