While Access Bank, the commercial banking
division of the country’s biggest lender Access Holdings, which converted to a
holding company this February, got N500 million in fine, Stanbic IBTC’s penalty
was N200 million, according to the news outlet, which cited a disclosure at a
virtual investor call arranged by the latter on Tuesday in Lagos.
CBN, sometime last February, embargoed
cryptocurrency trading, going ahead to instruct banks to disallow transactions
in it, noting they could trigger an exposure of the financial system to danger.
Wole Adeniyi, Stanbic IBTC’s chief, stated
his bank heeded the order but admitted the two deals for which it is being
punished is more of negligence than infringement as the transactions were
processed through its system without the lender discovering it.
The industry watchdog spotted the
transactions and their details, by way of an ultramodern surveillance
technology currently exclusive to it.
United Bank for Africa, one of Nigeria’s
five largest banks in asset terms, also shared in the regulator’s wrath,
incurring a penalty of N100 million.
Adeniyi said lenders are in talks with the
CBN to give them leave to use the software.
“It doesn’t seem that they are going to
entertain a refund, but they are now sharing intelligence with us to be able to
kind of deter clients,” he said.
Apart from the United States, Nigeria,
Africa’s biggest economy, is responsible for the biggest size of digital
currency deals in the world, according to Paxful, which runs a platform for
trading in Bitcoin.
The country is also home to the biggest
proportion of retail users with transactions below $10,000, according to
Chainalysis.
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