The staff strength in the nation’s banking sector rose by 12 per cent in the first half of 2018 from 90,923 staff recorded at the end of December 2017, even as number of junior staff dropped with increased number of contract staff.

This was contained in a Selected Banking Sector Data: Sectoral Breakdown of Credit, e-Payment Channels and Staff Strength (Q2 2018) data by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).

According to the data, the staff strength fell from 90,923 in December 2017 to 89,608 in March 2018 and then rose to 101,861 in June 2018.

An analysis of the data from December 2017 to June 2018 showed that the number of junior staff dropped by 1031 but the number of contract staff rose by 11,561, causing the total increase in banks’ staff strength within the period to settle at 10,938.

While the number of executive staff and senior staff rose from 204 to 213 and from 16,745 to 17,144 respectively within the period from the report, a further breakdown of the data revealed that, commercial banks contributed 11,508, accounting for 99.5 per cent of the 11,561 increase in the number of contract staff for the period.

There have been allegations over the recruitment strategy deployed by Nigerian banks to recruit contract staff to replace permanent staff as a way of cutting down cost associated with insurance, pension and allowances for the position.

Meanwhile, a total volume of 509,668,433 transactions valued at N32.90 trillion was recorded in Q2 2018 as data on Electronic Payment Channels in the Nigeria Banking Sector revealed.

“Automated Teller Machine (ATM) transactions dominated the volume of transactions recorded. 217,417,961 volumes of ATM transactions valued at N1.60 trillion were recorded in Q2 2018.

“In terms of credit to private sector, the total value of credit allocated by the bank stood at N15.34 trillion as at Q2 2018. Oil & Gas and Manufacturing sectors got credit allocation of N3.45 trillion and N2.02 trillion to record the highest credit allocation as at the period under review” NBS report said.

• Sourced from a Daily Independent report