Stakeholders in the electronic payment ecosystem have urged Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to mandate Payment Terminal Services Providers (PTSPs) to implement electronic journal at point of sale terminal transactions to restore confidence of merchants in the system.
They stated this at Point of Sale (PoS) Innovation Summit with the theme: “Expanding Retailers, Merchants Possibilities’, organized by Global Accelerex, a PoS vendor held in Lagos this week.
Tosin Eniolorunda, chief executive officer, TeamApt, while delivering a keynote at the summit identified some of the challenges merchants face in the use of Point of Sale as a means of payment, which include chargeback.
According to him, ‘chargeback is when a customer buys goods or service at a point of sale terminal and was debited but the POS did not print receipt showing a successful transaction, because it did not print a receipt, the merchant will refuse to give the customer the goods he requested for, while your account have been debited.
In this situation, you will have to go to your own bank which is not the bank of your merchant and file a claim of your money that is called chargeback.’
“The problem is resolved today by your bank logging it against the merchant and the merchant bank needs to investigate if that claim is correct or not, if it is true he did not give the customer the value, he will attest to the bank that it is true and for his bank to return the money to the customer.
If it is not true the bank will request for evidence that the merchant actually gave the customer the value.
“The evidence that is accepted today in the industry is a paper receipt.
That paper that was printed from the PoS, you need to go and get it, scan it and attest to the bank you gave that customer his value for the money not to be refunded.
“Imagine a very larger merchant that prints a lot of receipts you need to be storing PoS receipts and that receipt fads away with time.
“This challenge is why merchants are crying about chargebacks because they cannot respond appropriately and have only three days to do that before they will be charged.
The way to solve it is to prevent the merchants from needing to present receipt which is through e-journal,” he explained.
Electronic journal is ability of PoS to keep an evidence of all its transactions, when it keeps all those evidences; it sends them to a remote server at the bank of the merchant.
“POS has the capacity to do electronic journal.
A regulatory push for PTSPs to implement e-journal will go a long way to addressing this problem.
If regulator mandates that operators should implement e-journal in the next two months it will be done.
