The Association of Licensed Telecommunications Operators of Nigeria (ALTON) has issued notice to start cutting off debtor banks as from next Monday to force them to offset over N42 billion debt.
The banks accumulated the huge debt on unstructured supplementary service data (USSD) services, which have made their customers’ lives better.
A statement jointly signed by Gbenga Adebayo and Gbolahan Awonuga, ALTON chairman and head of operations respectively, on Thursday said it had a partnership with financial service providers on bearing the cost of USSD access by end-users but the arrangement could not continue following the issuance of the USSD pricing determination by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC).
“The banks decided that they would no longer pay for USSD service delivered to their customers and requested our members to charge customers directly for use of the USSD channel,” the statement read.
“This billing methodology where the customer is directly charged USSD access fees by our members irrespective of the service charges that the bank may subsequently apply to the customers’ bank account is called ‘End-User Billing’ which the banks specifically demanded that all our members implement.
“The banks, however, provided no assurances to our members that such service fees charged to customers’ bank accounts for access to bank services through the USSD channel would be discontinued post implementation of end-user billing by our members.”
ALTON said eight months after the NCC issued an updated pricing for USSD which restricted telcos from charging end-users for the service and mandated banks to negotiate the settlement of outstanding obligations, nothing has happened.
The telcos and the banks were to agree individual pricing mechanisms to be applied on USSD services.
ALTON claims that telcos continued to provide access to USSD infrastructure despite the N42 billion debt owed by the banks.
“Unfortunately, as it has been impossible to agree on a structure for these payments with the banks that do not involve the end-user being asked to pay, we deeply regret that we have reached a point where the withdrawal of these services has become unavoidable.”
In view of the foregoing, the association said it would withdraw USSD services in phases starting with the most significant debtors on Monday, March 15.
