Cheaper Ways To Pay for ACCA Exams

It is no longer news that the value of Naira has plummeted in recent times. International students and importers now face a harsh reality when seeking to pay certain fees. Banks like UBA now charge as high as N550 for £1.

People seeking to pay fees abroad cannot continue to rely on the exorbitant rates adopted by Nigerian banks, hence the need to look for cheaper means to pay such fees.

ACCA candidates can use one of the following means to pay for their exams:

1. Open an account that is domiciled in pounds. Demand for your debit card. Thereafter, proceed to fund your account when the exchange rates are somewhat favourable. The funds in your dorm account will not be susceptible to volatile changes in the exchange rates. The CBN has lifted the restriction on depositing foreign currencies into dorm accounts.

2. Get a relative or friend staying either in the US or UK to pay on your behalf. Such a person must have a Nigerian bank account and must be the type that usually need to send money to Nigeria. Now, £1 is approximately $1.50. Let's say you get someone in the US to help you pay £100. £100 is approximately $150. The person pays using the prevailing rate over there. You can then repay the person using a rate that is slightly above the CBN rate. Let's say you adopt N200. You will then transfer about N30,000 (N200 * $150) to the person's Nigerian bank account. Now, when people need to send money to Nigeria, Western Union and Money Gram use an exchange rate of N193. Therefore, repaying the person using an exchange rate of $1 = N200, will certainly be beneficial to such person as he will be making a gain of about N7 per dollar. The assumption here is that the person will never need to convert the money into dollars, because Western union and MoneyGram usually use the parallel rate when people try to convert from Naira to Dollars. If you had decided to pay the £100 by yourself, you would have spent as much as N50,000! Therefore, you would have saved about N20,000. Meanwhile, the guy abroad has gained about N1,050 (N7 * 150). Remember the assumption is that the guy will never need to convert the money in his Nigerian bank account to Dollars.

3. Open a savings account with either Stanbic IBTC or Standard Chartered. They always adopt the cheapest exchange rates. Both banks use a rate that is always below the parallel rate.

4. Apply for Forex from the CBN by filling a Form A. The drawback of this is that the process is complicated and it takes a while to process. Meanwhile the CBN recently announced that it will soon adopt a flexible exchange rate and the official band will apply to very few transactions. The implication of this is that it will be near impossible to get forex from CBN (for paying fees abroad) on a cheaper rate when this policy becomes fully operational.


Thanks for reading.