.jpg "Nigeria Closed 234 Branches, 649 ATMs In 2020 – IMF")
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has said Nigeria's 2020 Financial Access Score declined to 4.44 following the closure of 234 bank branches and 649 Automated Teller Machines (ATMs) in the year. The IMF said this during its 2021 Financial Access Survey (FAS) Trend and Developments release on Monday. Financial Access Survey is a dataset on the access to and use of financial services, aimed at policymaking to enable the monitoring of financial inclusion as a benchmark of progress against its peers.
The FAS has 64 indicators to enable comparison in areas such as the size of the population, land area, and gross domestic product (GDP).
According to the report the international community uses two FAS indicators to monitor the target 8.10 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which aims to strengthen the capacity of domestic financial institutions in a bid to expand access to banking and financial services.
The two FAS indicators are the Number of Commercial Bank branches per 100,000 adults and the Number of ATMs per 100,000 adults, which Nigeria recorded a decline of these indicators and 12 others among the total 64 FAS indicators.
The report noted that the 4.44 decline from the 4.78 of 2019 was due to the closure of bank branches in Nigeria to 5,158 from 5,392 in 2019.
Also, the number of ATMs per 100,000 adults declined by 649 ATMs to 17.19 in 2020 from the 16.14 it recorded in 2019.
While commercial bank branches per 1,000km2 in Nigeria reduced to 5.94 in 2020 compared to the 5.68 in 2019 and number of ATMs per 1,000km2 fell to 20.65 from the 21.36 in 2019.
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