The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) announced that its ongoing biometric project is expected to be completed in 2015.

The second phase of the exercise would be launched early next year, the bank said.

Governor of the CBN, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, who disclosed this at the CBN and World Economic Forum meeting, said the second phase would ensure full capture of biometric details of all banks' customers nationwide in less than a year.

“We will officially launch the second phase of the biometric data base on 14 February 2014 with all head offices of banks and a branch of the banks. By 2015 we would have certainly concluded the project,” said Sanusi.

The project, according to him, is expected to provide a centralised platform through which banks might enroll and uniquely verify the identity of each customer through ‘know your customer’ (KYC) purposes, perform credit checks, verify customer’s integrity and authenticate customers from a point of transaction device.

Sanusi said the project represented a major landmark in the bankers committee’s efforts at promoting financial inclusion drive, expanding banking services, access to credit and more importantly, dealing with money laundering and other financial industry problems.

He explained that the CBN and the banks decided to embark on the project as a proactive strategy to enhance the integrity of banking services delivery by building a reliable customer identification system which would help in complementing the other projects being embarked upon by various government agencies.