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Chibuzor Obilom

3y ago

Software Quality Lead | Multidisciplinary 'TechPro' combining expertise in Quality, Products, Delivery & Processes | Fintech (Payments & Payments Infra)

A Simplistic Explanation of How NIP Works
Chibuzor Obilom

Many people in the fintech space believe that NIBSS uses money that settlement banks have with CBN to facilitate #payments. NIBSS/NIP is not directly involved in 'moving' money.

  1. When a customer (sender) initiates a transaction, the debiting bank debits the #customer after they have confirmed a transaction is successful (the FTDebit method is successful - 00 Response). This is after Name Enquiry is successful (account name confirmation).

  2. The crediting bank gets the corresponding FTCredit request and then double-checks using the TSQ method. Once the TSQ method responds favourably, they [crediting bank] then credit their #customer (receiver) with the exact amount in the response body from the method(s).

  3. How does the crediting bank get their #money? NIBSS collates all the inflows and outflows for each bank on a daily basis and runs a deduction to get the net value of transactions per bank.

  4. These net values are communicated to CBN via a secured channel. Every bank's position with the CBN is updated with the net values from NIBSS, by the CBN

This is a high-level explanation of how A2A transfers and subsequent #settlements work on NIP. Some extra steps were skipped to achieve brevity.

To conclude:

  • NIBSS does not move money in NIP #transactions.

  • NIP is a messaging API between banks, for the purpose of transmitting financial transaction (FT) instructions.

  • NIBSS does not directly update bank positions with the CBN. The CBN does the updates to bank(s) positions.

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