The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) imposed N200 million fine on Stanbic IBTC Bank for permitting crypto transactions by customers in breach of a directive from the regulator last year, forbidding such deals.
This according a report by Bloomberg, which cited a disclosure at a virtual investor call arranged by the bank on Tuesday in Lagos.
CBN, sometime last February, embargoed cryptocurrency trading, going ahead to instruct banks to disallow transactions in it, noting they could trigger an exposure of the financial system to danger.
Wole Adeniyi, Stanbic IBTC’s chief, stated his bank heeded the order but admitted the two deals for which it is being punished is more of negligence than infringement as the transactions were processed through its system without the lender discovering it.
The industry watchdog spotted the transactions and their details, by way of an ultramodern surveillance technology currently exclusive to it.
Apart from the United States, Nigeria, Africa’s biggest economy, is responsible for the biggest size of digital currency deals in the world, according to Paxful, which runs a platform for trading in Bitcoin.
The country is also home to the biggest proportion of retail users with transactions below $10,000, according to Chainalysis