Nigerian commercial banks are once again forced to count their losses as the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) forced bank to give up a substantial part of customers their customers deposit.
Banks use the money in deposit accounts to make loans to other people or businesses. In return, the bank receives interest payments on those loans from borrowers.
According to data gathered from ten commercial banks’ financial statements, the CBN removed a whopping N7.02 trillion of customer deposits from banks’ accounts and kept it in its vault.
The deposits kept with CBN will not be available for banks to use in their day-to-day operations.
The banks include: Access Bank Plc, Guaranty Trust Bank (GTBank), United Bank for Africa (UBA) Plc, FCMB group and Sterling Bank Plc.
The others are; Union Bank of Nigeria Plc, Stanbic IBTC Holdings Plc, Fidelity Bank Plc, and Zenith Bank Plc.
Why does CBN do this
The CBN conducts this exercise using its Cash reserve ratio (CRR) policy, which was introduced in 2019, requiring banks to retain 27.5 percent of total customer deposits.
Godwin Emefiele in the last Monetary Policy meeting noted that the use of CRR is important in its fight against inflation, ThisDay reports
Breakdown of how much was removed from banks accounts by CBN
Access Bank- N1.47trillion
Zenith Bank – N1.25trillion
GTBank – N953 billion
UBA- N915.15billion
Union Bank – N454.8billion
Stanbic IBTC- N423.18billion
Fidelity Bank – N686.1billion
Wema Bank – N313.8billion
FCMB Group – N309.63billion
Sterling Bank – N243.87billion
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