Interconnected

How do you connect multiple banks?

If you missed Friday’s Notadeepdive, catch up here.

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Connecting the banks

At some point in October 2003, someone put a UBA card into a First Bank ATM and withdrew ₦1,000.

Today, that sounds unremarkable, but it took nearly twenty years of engineering and an unusual act of cooperation among rival banks to make it possible.

In 2002, Nigeria had roughly 90 banks, 68 ATMs and 1,800 POS terminals. A transfer took three days, and many banks could not connect to their own branches, let alone another bank’s network.

The accepted Interswitch story begins with Mitchell Elegbe and an ATM in Scotland. Our episode goes further back: to TCASS and Telnet, the engineers who connected Nigeria’s first bank branches, seven banks that invested ₦200 million, and a cap table designed to solve a trust problem.

Nnanna Ijezie and I spent months reconstructing the story.