Ahead of full compliance by Nigeria banks with the newly adopted Nigerian Uniform Bank Account Numbering (NUBAN), Union Registrar Limited has commenced revalidation of e-dividend mandates of shareholders in various company registers.
The Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Union Registrars Limited, Mr. Tunde Ayeni ,who stated this in Lagos enjoined bank account holders who were shareholders in various company registers managed by the registrar company to revalidate their mandates to facilitate e-dividend payments directly into their accounts.
Ayeni also advised shareholders to take advantage of the e-dividend initiative to reduce the lag time of the receipts of declared dividends, and avert likelihood of loss or diversion of dividend warrants in transits.
The managing director who said that the company was mindful of ways of adding value to its shareholders noted that with NUBAN shareholders had been allocated new account numbers and as such, if their account details were not revalidated it might result to loss of dividends.
“In order to facilitate e-dividend payments, all shareholders who have previously advised us of their erstwhile account numbers are advised to revalidate their e-dividend mandate with us,” he said.
The Registrar/Chief Executive of the Institute of Capital Market Registrars, Dr. Walker Ogogo, had recently expressed readiness of capital market registrars to revalidate shareholders’ e-dividend accounts as soon as banks comply with NUBAN, emphasising that they were technologically equipped to deliver value added services to shareholders and companies.
The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) had set June 2011 as the deadline for banks to fully comply with the Nigeria Uniform Bank Account Number (NUBAN) scheme. The CBN released the guidelines on the NUBAN scheme in August, 2010, to achieve uniform customer bank account numbering structure among all Deposit Money Banks (DMB) in Nigeria.
The NUBAN scheme is expected to resolve problems with electronic payments in Nigeria, as many of them are related to specification of wrong beneficiary account numbers.
Every bank is required to create and maintain a NUBAN code for every customer account (current, savings, etc) in its customer records database, and the NUBAN code would be the only account number to be used at all interfaces with a bank customer.