The Central Bank of Nigeria has revoked the licences of existing bureau de change operators, directing them to reapply for fresh licences.

This is contained in a new guidelines released by the apex bank on Wednesday.

“All existing BDCs shall: Re-apply for a new licence according to any of the tiers or licence category of their choice as provided in the guidelines,” CBN stated in the guideline signed by Haruna Mustafa, director of the financial policy and regulation department.

The apex bank set the application fee for Tier-1 licence at N1 million, minimum capital at N2 billion and licensing fee at N5 million.

For Tier 2, application fee was pegged at N250,000, minimum capital requirement N500 million and licensing fee N2 million.

The revised guidelines, however, struck out the mandatory caution fees of N200 million for Tier-1 and N50 million for Tier-2 BDC operators and forbade them from engaging in cryptocurrency assets, derivative trading, international outward transfers and accepting international inward transfers.

The CBN gave the BDC operators six-month ultimatum to come up with the minimum capital requirements for their desired Tier effective Wednesday, date of the guidelines’ publication.