The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has extended the account revalidation exercise for customers of Deposit Money Banks (DMBs) by one month to January 31, 2011.

The move, it said was to allow more customers of DMBs to update their records.

The apex bank had on November 29, 2010, given bank customers one month to update their bank records or face the risk of being barred from having access to such accounts.

The period had commenced from December 1 and expired on December 31, 2010.

The CBN Deputy Governor, Financial System Stability, Dr. Kingsley Moghalu, had while giving the directive, denied insinuations that the decision was to witch-hunt any politician.

He said rather, it was part of the ongoing reforms aimed at sanitising the banking sector for effective service delivery.

He said that DMBs had, in the past, faced challenges in their quest to obtain necessary information from customers as required by the apex bank, owing to two reasons.

The reasons, he said stemmed from the fact that information already obtained over the years was either out of date or inaccurate, or that customers were reluctant to supply the required information primarily because they were not aware of its importance.

Customers of the DMBs had, last Friday in a move to beat the December 31 deadline, made last-minute efforts to get their accounts updated.

Some of them, who could not update their records owing to the large crowd that besieged the banks, had urged the apex bank to extend the deadline.

The CBN, in a statement on Monday, directed all financial institutions to ensure compliance with the revised deadline.

“Having reviewed the progress made so far and the response of the banking public, the CBN has extended the deadline for the information update of bank accounts from December 31, 2010 to January, 31, 2011.

“The bank has, therefore, directed all financial institutions to ensure compliance with the revised deadline and suspend operations of all accounts with un-updated information with effect from 1st February, 2011.

“The account update is part of the Customer Due Diligence, which involves Know Your Customer compliance, which is accepted worldwide as a tool for the fight against money laundering and terrorism financing as well as protecting the interest of customers. All banks are required to ensure compliance.”