No respite in law for Nigerian online bankers

By SEGUN ORUAME & OFFIONG ENE

If you are feeling cool that your bank just sent you an email or SMS alert on your most recent transactions, it’s because things appear to be in order.

But you would develop goose pimples if the alert said you have made huge withdrawals that you are certainly not aware of, which could mean that criminals have beaten through the tracks to wipe clean your account.

There may be little comfort in the law for you should you consider the need to take your bank to court and seek redress over the breech. Laws in Nigeria are still mortar and brick while the banks have taking the banking halls into the web and the mobile phone.

There are still no specific legal provisions in Nigeria to address online transactions, particularly e-banking, said Lagos based lawyer Ms Nseobong Akpan who is also a law and technology columnist

Although cases of possible breeches could be addressed by the courts under the existing, conventional laws as they affect criminal intents and acts, there are still no specific  provisions for online transactions or reflect the steady transition into the New (Information) Age, said Akpan in an exclusive interview with IT Edge in Lagos where she addressed other issues such as protection of digital contents.

“[There] are international conventions with provisions for digital rights protection which Nigeria is a signatory to…. But I am not aware that these specific provision as to the said  digital rights have been domesticated to become laws in Nigeria. But you can protect your copyright or intellectual property under the old laws as it is now but it will be a bit  difficult.” Read full Interview

Nigerian banks have spent millions of US dollars to deploy technology to drive new services such as online and mobile banking in the last few years. But this year has witnessed massive uptake of the services as banks seek to grow their customer base with emphasis on technologically driven services.

Now, many customers could do their basic transactions and even pay for utility services via their mobile phones. The infrastructural risk is minimal to the human risk, says technology analyst Olu Gboyega Alabi-Isama raising fears that breeches could be effected more by insiders within the banks than outside rogues.

“We shouldn’t forget that banking, be it offline or online, is a customer centred relationship in the sense that there are basic contract laws which you sign even when you want to open an account, because you are given forms to fill and then you sign.”

“Even for the online banking or e-banking the bank makes you sign a document but the question is how many of us have read it because that will be the primary contract spelling out your obligations and liability of the banks and its customers?”

“I will think that the banks which draft this contract are protected, they give it to us and we just sign, we should take time to read it and if there is something we don’t agree with or understand then we should ask questions but most people don’t do this.”

A bill, the ‘Computer Security and Critical Information Infrastructure Protection Bill 2005,’ to address online transactions and protect computers and network environments against likely breeches is still at the country’s national legislative assembly.

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