Nigerian banks have recorded a total of 4.8 million new Bank Verification Numbers (BVNs) in 2022.
This was according to the data released by the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS).
NewsBeatng reports that this brought the total number of registered BVNs in the country to 56.5 million. As of December 2021, the BVN database stood at 51.7 million.
The 2022 figure showed a slowdown in the BVN database growth compared with 2021 when the database had increased by 6 million from 45.7 million in December 2020 to 51.7 million.
According to NIBSS, active bank accounts in the country stood at 133.5 million as of December 2021.
While data for 2022 has yet to be released, the figure is expected to be higher than that of the preceding year, which shows that there is still a wide gap between the registered BVN and the number of bank accounts.
However, analysts argued that since multiple accounts can be linked to a single BVN, the difference may not be much.
