Dormant accounts are the quiet weak point of any banking system: balances no one is watching, attached to identities no one has re-checked in years. That inattention is exactly what fraudsters look for. The Central Bank of Nigeria’s March 2026 circular tightens the door, mandating stricter authentication for reactivating dormant accounts, with fresh KYC documents and management approval now required.

The logic is straightforward. An account that has gone quiet may belong to a customer who has simply moved on, but it may also be a target for takeover, where a third party reactivates it to launder funds or drain a forgotten balance. By demanding current know-your-customer documentation rather than the records on file at dormancy, the CBN forces a re-verification at the moment of highest risk. The added management sign-off raises the internal bar so reactivation is a deliberate decision, not a teller-level routine.

For banks, the operational cost is real: more friction, more queries, more cases that stall at the approval step. For customers returning to a long-idle account, the message is to arrive with valid identification rather than expect instant access. For the system, the payoff is a smaller pool of low-assurance accounts sitting ready to be misused.

This provision sits alongside the circular’s instant-payments and BVN measures as part of one tightening of the identity layer beneath Nigerian banking.

The takeaway: in Nigeria’s reformed framework, an idle account is no longer a soft entry point, it is a checkpoint that must be cleared again.