The Central Bank of Nigeria has banned bureau de change operators from trading foreign currencies on the streets.

The CBN’s director for risk management, Blaise Ijebor, announced the ban on Thursday while speaking at a conference in Lagos.

“Street trading of foreign currencies is not allowed,” Mr Ijebor said. “We don’t want BDCs under the trees. They should be in offices. You walk into their office, change your currency and walk away.” 

Mr Ijebor said the ban aligned with CBN’s vision to give operators “market structure” that will ease compliance to regulations. It also enables the top bank to keep an eye on BDC operators’ activities and identify those who aren’t complying.

“One of the things we want to do is make BDCs focus on the original conceived vision, which is to provide that market structure for people who need to do small small transactions and do not need to go to the banks to do those transactions,” the CBN director said.

“So we need BDC to come together to form bodies, that way regulation is not too extensive for them. They can receive regulation, apply to regulation, and everything will work better for everybody,” he added.

CBN, last Wednesday, revoked licences of existing BDCs and unveiled a new set of guidelines that must be followed to reapply for fresh licences.

The top bank raised minimum capital for Tier-1 BDC intending operators from N35 million to N2 billion, set application fee at N1 million and licencing fee at N5 million

For Tier 2, application fee was N250,000, minimum capital requirement was N500 million and licensing fee was N2 million.Naira as of Sunday morning traded at N1510 to one dollar in the parallel market and official rate was N1479.69, according to Aboki Forex, a platform that publishes naira rates against other currencies