The bill for an Act to provide a holistic supervision of payment through e-platforms has scaled through Second Reading in the Senate on Tuesday.
In the lead debate, Senator John Owan Enoh, PDP, Cross River Central Senatorial District explained that the purpose of the bill was to provide legal framework for effective and efficient electronic payment platforms in a manner that is in accordance with global best practices.
Enoh stated: “This bill is an Act to provide for Management, administration, operation, regulation and Supervision of payment, clearing and settlement systems in the Federal Republic of Nigeria and to provide for other related matters.”
He explained that it was an attempt to institutionalize payment which was propelled by huge data produced by Google that about 2 billion people made payment electronically across the globe on daily basis, while 1 billion uses YouTube, and that 5 million people tweets.
Adding that the world has become ICT driven and as such Nigeria cannot be left behind.
He reminded that government was already set to leverage on e-payment platforms for efficiency and to deal with incessant cases of money laundering.
Supporting the bill, Shehu Sani (APC), Kaduna Central Senatorial district said the bill would address the gap created whereby if payment were made in the course of transactions and anything goes wrong, the culprit will be handled.
According to him, terrorists have transferred huge sums of money without notice and the framework will help the situation as well.
“The legal instrument will protect consumers in a manner that if payment for goods and services is paid online, particularly to those people you have not seen and things go wrong, the matter could be dealt with properly,” he said.
In his remark, the Deputy Senate President, Senator Ike Ekweremadu emphasized that the bill was important in view of the quantum of e-transactions. He asked the Committee on Finance to work on it and report back in two weeks time.
It will be recalled that the bill was presented for first reading by Senator John Owan Enoh on May 4th 2016.
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