The Central Bank of Nigeria in a circular released yesterday, placed new restrictions limiting daily withdrawal to N100,000 on the use of  Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD), the portal used to send and receive payments offline, for the transfer of funds. The Bank stated that these new restrictions have been placed due to security risks associated with using the USSD portal. Transactions to be made above N20,000 will now also require both pin and soft token, as an additional restriction on the use of USSD.

CBN stated that the order will take effect in June, and instructs banks to allow customers to withdraw from the use of USSD supported financial services at their will.