Banking Agents’ Point of Sale (POS) Operations and Financial Inclusion in Ife Central Local Council Development Area (LCDA), Osun State Nigeria.

Abstract

Point of Sale (POS) is one of the services carried out by agent banking system to provide financial services to unbanked person(s). The POS has limited range of services to provide to the people in rural area(s) and agents were often confronted with problems of high illiteracy rate, high transaction charges, and increase in financial ignorance, transaction limits, cyber security and cash management porosity. In view of this, this study examined agent banking’s Point of Sale (POS) Operations and financial inclusion in Ife Central, Local Council Development Area (LCDA), Ife, Osun State, Nigeria. The research work employed primary sources of data via questionnaire. Population of the study was fifty-six (56). While the sample for the study was forty (40). The response rate reflected 71.4%. The research employed descriptive and inferential statistical approaches. The former entailed tables and frequencies while the latter adopted ordinal logit regression analysis to interpret the collected data. The results depicted that Point of Sale (POS) has a marginal influence on financial inclusion awareness at 11.4% in the area and scientifically significant at (0.000 <0.05). The conclusion was that POS business is continually to grow in the zones marginally to promote financial inclusion, which is in tandem with the policy of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to drive cashless economy. The study recommended that banks should come up with flexible innovation to provide services that could easily be accessible and affordable to meet customers and non-customers’ needs in the rural area.