If you hold a current account in Nigeria, there is a fair chance your account officer has, at some point, approached you with a reference form and a polite plea to “help someone.”
Often, that someone is a person you barely know and occasionally someone you do not know at all.
For decades, the referee system has been treated as a sacred fixture in current account onboarding, a throwback to a banking era that relied on personal trust, handwritten forms and the hope that people would not vanish after issuing a bad cheque.
The rule sits on old prudential assumptions under the Banks and Other Financial Institutions Act, reflecting a time when banks had little more than paper files and staff intuition to guide risk decisions.
Back then, a referee acted as a human placeholder for proper identity verification, offering reassurance that the applicant was credible and reachable. In a world of shaky records and unreliable address checks, this analogue patch served its purpose.
That era is gone, and so is the justification.
Nigeria’s financial system now runs on digital infrastructure that offers more precise insights than any acquaintance’s signature could. BVN links customer identities across institutions and builds a consistent behavioural trail, while NIN provides biometrics and demographic records that are hard to game.
SIM registration ties mobile numbers to verified individuals, and the Corporate Affairs Commission’s digital portal supplies transparent information on directors and ownership structures.
Most applicants for current accounts already hold savings or corporate accounts, which means their financial histories are visible, structured and regulated. These tools do not only outperform referees; they render the idea almost quaint.
Open banking pushes this even further. With customer consent, banks can access verified identity data, transaction patterns, cashflow behaviour and account histories across the ecosystem. Risk modelling now depends on real-time analytics, not personal endorsements. In this context, the referee form resembles a regulatory souvenir rather than a meaningful safeguard.
Worse, the rule is not harmless; it introduces friction where none is needed. Nigerians in the diaspora, who maintain property, pensions and investments at home, struggle to meet a requirement designed for people who live close enough to knock on their referees’ doors.
Foreign investors face a procedural oddity that does not exist in peer markets, which hardly helps a country working to attract capital. Pension administrators dealing with non-resident contributors encounter the same hurdle, while foreign companies opening Nigerian accounts waste time hunting for referees even though their documentation is already verifiable through modern systems.
Digital banks have demonstrated that life goes on without this ritual. They rely on BVN, NIN, geolocation intelligence and real-time transaction monitoring, and they manage risk more effectively than any paper reference ever has.
Regulators accept that no system eliminates fraud entirely, yet the evidence shows that technology lowers it through stronger identity assurance and behavioural transparency. In contrast, handwritten references offer no measurable protection and, in many cases, serve as light administrative theatre.
The global picture aligns with this reality. Mature markets, from the UK and US to Singapore, the UAE and South Africa, do not ask for referees. Their onboarding frameworks depend on digital identification, address verification, source-of-funds checks, bureau data and automated fraud detection. Nigeria now possesses these same capabilities and continues to refine them.
The referee tradition mattered when the country lacked the tools to verify identity and track behaviour at scale. Today, the CBN itself has mandated the very infrastructure BVN, NIN, open banking, improved address mapping, better credit reporting and real-time monitoring that makes the requirement unnecessary.
The referee tradition mattered when the country lacked the tools to verify identity and track behaviour at scale. Today, the CBN itself has mandated the very infrastructure BVN, NIN, open banking, improved address mapping, better credit reporting and real-time monitoring that makes the requirement unnecessary.
If a bank can confirm who a customer is, where they live, how they transact and whether they present meaningful risk, then collecting two signatures from acquaintances does little more than introduce noise into a process that should be straightforward.
As Nigeria works to expand financial access, welcome investment, enable diaspora participation and modernise its banking landscape, phasing out the reference requirement is both practical and overdue. The sector has evolved and the technology has matured, so the CBN should let modern verification do the work that handwritten endorsements can no longer justify.