If you are a GTBank customer and hold a debit card from the same, you have probably received an email notifying you of an annual card maintenance fee of N100. The new fee is said to be in line with the Central Bank of Nigeria's Banker's Tarrif, and is effective from the 23rd of December 2014.
As far as i can currently confirm, only GTBank has sent this message. Of course, since this is a CBN directive , it is only a matter of time before all the other banks fall in.
The banks charge N1,000 every time they issue a new card. And new issues include replacing lost or expired cards. Each has a term of four years, which means that in the end, a card that is carried to term will now cost forty percent more, or N1,400.
What is this change for ? we don't know yet. We also don't know how it will be divided between the CBN and the bank. Annual card maintenance charges are not noticed in the Central Bank's Revised Guide to Bank Charges, announced in 2013. But the guide couldn't have provided for the relatively recent N65 charge for remote-on-us ATM withdrawals that is the fee for withdrawing from an ATM that is ''your bank's''.
That exact directive has been in force since September, and quite a few N65 debits on my account since then convince me that it's real.
As of now we have not seen any official communication from the CBN about the new N100 annual maintenance fee, but GTBank's message to it's customers is as good as any guarantee that the CBN will be helping itself to a tidy Christmas haul from bank card users before 2014 ends. There are between four to five million GTBank debit cards in circulation, according to informed guesstimates by banking specialists I have communicated with. A ThisDay report puts debit (ATM) cards in circulation at 26 million as at 2012. That would mean the CBN stands to rake in anything from N400 million from just GTBank, and more than N3 billion across the board.
Some of the early recipients of the notice are not too happy. Puzzled customers have taken to social media to kvetch about it. The new CBN Governor, Mr. Godwin Emefiele seems, in some options, very tariff happy. Others are placing their angst at the feet of GTBank, which seems to be the first and only bank as of this report to go public with the directive.
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