Telcos and Banks end long running squabble In October 2019, MTN Nigeria sent a notification to its customers that it would begin charging them a fee every time they used Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) codes to make bank transactions. It followed a new decision from the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) a month before that allowed telcos to charge customers directly for those transactions. Because USSD transactions are done via mobile networks, they cost money and someone has to pay. In the beginning, the plan was for banks to pay those charges which telcos say are around N12 for one session and then remit it in bulk to the telcos. The banks balked at that plan and asked telcos to charge customers directly.