CBN boosts forex supply by $170m

The Central Bank of Nigeria on Thursday offered the sum of $100m as wholesale interventions and sold about $70m to meet requests for business and personal travel allowances.

The CBN said the move was in a bid to sustain the tempo of foreign exchange supply to the interbank market and ensure liquidity to enable more bank customers and other business people to overcome the difficulty of obtaining forex for their transactions.

The CBN Acting Director, Corporate Communications, Isaac Okorafor, said in a statement that the bank remained resolute in ensuring that it supplied enough forex to genuine customers of Deposit Money Banks and increase liquidity in the market.

According to him, the uniqueness of the wholesale forwards is that banks are allowed to use their winnings from auctions to fund matured obligations to meet Letters of Credit remittances, extinguish bills for collection and other forex demands.

He said with the development, importers who had hitherto been using bills for collection would now experience relief instead of having to patronise other more expensive sources.

The CBN had on Tuesday injected another sum of $100m into the interbank foreign exchange market in its resolve to ease the challenge of access to foreign exchange by genuine customers.

Thursday’s injection by the CBN takes the amount so far offered in the interbank forex market within the past few weeks to over $1.2bn for both wholesale and retail interventions.