November 10,2022

A Nigerian student at the University of Derby, United Kingdom, risks the revocation of his visa due to Ecobank’s “refusal to credit the institution” with his school fees.

The student, who wished not to be named, told FIJ that he applied online for the payment of his school fees through Form A, a bank request that allow customers fulfill their foreign currency payment obligations, through the CBN’s trade monitoring system on September 8, 2022

“The deadline for paying my school fees was November 1. This means the university will soon lock me out of its student’s portal over my failure to pay as and when due,” the student said.

“Ideally, the processing and approving of the Form A application is not supposed to take this long. However, in my case, my school fees payment is yet to debited from my Ecobank account two months after I applied.”

The student also noted that this was his second time of applying for such payments through the channel.

“During the first time I applied, the bank processed my application within one month,” he said.

“The CBN owns the website used for the Form A request. When you apply on the website, you include the branch of your bank that is expected to make the payment. Now, when all the documents you have submitted are correct, your bank branch would forward them to the CBN, for onward review. The moment the apex bank is satisfied with documents tendered, they send them back to the bank for payment.

“I was told that this particular application was already at the disbursement stage, and this means the CBN had reviewed my documents and Ecobank was supposed to have debited my bank account and credited my institution

The student said he subsequently sent messages to Ecobank on the issue on two of its social media platforms but received contrasting responses in the end.

“I reached out to the bank on Facebook and Twitter pages to know the reason for the delay. They said when it gets to my turn, I will surely be credited. The funniest part is that their replies were different,” the student said.

In response to his message on Facebook, the bank wrote: “Feedback gotten from the unit in charge states that allocation for the week has been fully utilized and we stopped at transaction approved on 7th of September 2022. Your request will be treated in due time.”

On Twitter, however, the bank wrote: “As of this week, we are on transactions approved /confirmed on 1st September and will continue from there. Kindly exercise patience on this request as we will provide feedback ASAP. Thank you.”

When FIJ contacted Ecobank for comments on the issue, one of the financial institution’s customer care officers, who did not disclose her name, said “the bank only processes Form A payments allocated by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) every week”.

The official also said that the student would have to exercise more patience, adding that his institution in the UK would be credited as soon as the bank receives the go-ahead.

On how long it ought to take for the fees to be processed by the bank, the official did not give any comment.

“The fault is not from us. Since the student has applied through the Form A platform, he will definitely be debited once we receive the allocation for his payment from the CBN. We usually receive a weekly email to that effect. So, he should exercise patience, and we apologise for the delay,” the official said