On June 5, a Germany-based Nigerian who preferred to be identified in this story as Ade Bayo transferred €1,500 through Tranzfar, a cross-border payment solution company.
Over six months after the transaction was consummated, the processing company neither delivered the money to its intended destination nor reversed it.
The customer has contacted Tranzfar to resolve the delay many times, but it has failed to match words with action.
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“I have done everything humanly possible to appeal to them to refund my money but their response is always the same, ‘We are working on it.’ I’m really tired,” Bayo told FIJ on January 30.
Evidence of the transaction.
“To be honest with you, the money is not mine and the owner has continued to mount pressure on me. It has got to a stage where he does not want to believe me again.”
On June 6, Regina, a customer service specialist at Tranzfar, told Bayo via email that “all relevant teams are working diligently to resolve the issue as swiftly as possible”.
In another email on June 7, the company attributed the delay to a transmission downtime on the part of the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS), Nigeria’s digital payment handling platform.
“Upon our investigation, we discovered that the delay is partly due to a downtime being experienced by the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System, our partner in processing transactions. NIBSS is currently undergoing maintenance or experiencing technical issues which have impacted the processing speed of transactions across various platforms, including ours,” part of the company’s emailed response read.
Despite expressing his dissatisfaction with the service of the company officially, the issue remained unresolved at press time.
“I have written different emails without getting the issue resolved. It is the worst experience I have experienced since I was born. I did not even set out to use their platform on that day,” Bayo told FIJ.
The company’s response on June 7 attributing the problem to the NIBSS.
“I have some apps I use for inter-country transfers. At the point of transferring, I just remembered that it had been [a] long [time since] I used their app. So, I decided to split the transaction. I sent one on their app and used another app for the second transaction. The second one paid the naira equivalent into the given account instantly but Tranzfar is yet to pay or reverse the transaction.”
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Since June when Bayo had contacted the company, his complaint received no promising result.
Tranzfar had not responded to FIJ’s email sent on January 31 at press time.
An email sent to the NIBSS to verify the status of the transaction was acknowledged on Thursday.
“Please be informed that this request is receiving attention. Feedback will be provided as soon as possible,” the NIBSS stated.
The post Germany-Based Nigerian Sent €1,500 Through Tranzfar. No Delivery, No Reversal 7 Months Later appeared first on Foundation For Investigative Journalism.