FG Introduces Tokens To Replace NIN Slips And Polycarbonate Cards

The Federal Government has introduced a suite of digital Tokens to replace the NIN slip and polycarbonate card. While speaking during the stakeholders’ workshop on the National Identification Number, NIN, Tokenization Solution organized by National Identity Management Commission, NIMC, the minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Isa Pantami said government adopted the solution to ensure privacy of personal identifiable information of individuals during verification transactions and to reduce incidences of illegal retrieval, usage, transfer, and storage of NIN.

The Minister who was ably represented by the Director-General of NIMC, Aliyu Abubakar said the full implementation begins on Jan. 1, 2022.

He added that the tokenization solution was customized to protect personal identifiable information and to protect the sanctity as well as sensitivity of the NIN issued by NIMC to registered individuals.

He said anonymization was also catered for with the attachment of the UserID of the verifier to every verification request, adding that no NIN, no verification adding that NIN tokens are MDA or merchant specific and expire after a set period of time, saying that a token generated for company A cannot be utilized by company B.

The tokenization consists of 16 Alpha-numberic characters. starting and ending with two letters of the Alphabets.

Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Prof. Isa Ali Ibrahim PantamI

It is issued by an ID Holder, either via the NIMC MWS Mobile ID apps or via USSD on a feature phone and only by the NIMC, while a mobile number linked to in is required to participate, also, and also generation of the token or Virtual NIN is unintelligent, completely random with no correlation to the NIN and cannot be reverse engineered, even by a Quantum Computer.

Dolupo Balogun

Written by BoomRadioNG