ALTON Backs NCC, CBN’s New USSD Billing Policy to Resolve Bank-Telco Dispute

The Association of Licensed Telecommunications Companies of Nigeria (ALTON) has endorsed the newly introduced End User Billing (EUB) policy by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) in collaboration with the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN).The policy mandates that charges for Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) services be deducted directly from customers’ airtime, effectively removing banks from the billing chain.Speaking in an exclusive interview with Daily Sun, ALTON chairman, Gbenga Adebayo, expressed confidence in the policy’s potential to resolve the long-standing remittance dispute between telecom operators and Nigerian banks.“Yes, we think the new USSD billing policy will solve telcos/banks’ disagreement on remittances, because what it will do is that the cost of using USSD will now be deducted from customers’ airtime. So, the obligation of paying for that will no longer be on the banks. It will rather be on the customers’ airtime,” he said.Adebayo also shed light on the now-defunct corporate billing system, which made banks responsible for collecting USSD charges from users’ bank accounts and remitting the funds to telecom operators. The system, he said, was marred by delayed and sometimes failed remittances.The EUB model is expected to bring transparency and accountability to the USSD billing process while strengthening the financial relationship between stakeholders in Nigeria’s digital financial ecosystem.