Managing Director, CRC Credit Bureau Limited, Mr Tunde Popoola has said that a major significant issue affecting access to credit in Nigeria is lack of unique identifier for every inhabitants.
Popoola who disclosed this in Lagos at the Finance Correspondents Association of Nigeria (FICAN) bi- monthly forum said the country has multiple forms of identification, adding that government issued indentifiers for individuals include national ID, BVN, Drivers Licence, Voters card and international Passport.
He explained that in most countries with successful credit Bureau infrastructure, there is always one single means of identification, noting that in Europe and America they use social security number while Egypt used National Identity card.
Expressing the need for Nigeria to have unique identifier, he said “India commenced deployment of unique identifier in 2009, today about 1.1billion Indians out of a population of 1.3 billion have government issued unique identification numbers.”
He however said that the current use of multiple identification makes data matching very tedious, cumbersome and expensive for the bureaus because they relies on identification of data subjects to be able to match and merge data and develop innovative products for the market.
Urging the government to speedily implement a unique identifier for every Nigerian, he noted that the BVN introduced by the CBN does not fully solve unique identifier challenge as data providers have been unable to fully provide BVN’s for legacy accounts.
