The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has released the names of the 46 microfinance banks whose operating licences were revoked for failing to meet the regulatory requirements for continued operation.

The apex bank disclosed on Wednesday that the revocation was carried out in accordance with its powers under Sections 12 and 13 of the Banks and Other Financial Institutions Act (BOFIA), 2020.

According to the CBN, the licences were revoked because the affected microfinance banks had insufficient assets to meet their liabilities, closed operations without regulatory approval, or became inactive and ceased financial intermediation.

The revocations were also attributed to the banks’ failure to commence operations within 12 months of obtaining their licences and failure to maintain the minimum capital funds unimpaired by losses.

READ ALSO: CBN revokes licences of 46 microfinance banks

Revocation list

On the list of 46 microfinance banks whose licences were revoked, Kano State accounted for the highest number, with 13 banks, followed by Lagos with 8.

Also, Abia, the Federal Capital Territory (Abuja), Kaduna, Kebbi, Niger, Ogun, Plateau, recorded two banks each, while Anambra, Akwa Ibom, Bayelsa, Benue, Cross River, Delta, Kwara, Ondo, Osun, Oyo, and Rivers had one bank each.

By category, 25 of the affected institutions were Tier 2 microfinance banks, 18 were Tier 1 microfinance banks, and three were State microfinance banks.

The regulator said the license revocation forms part of its ongoing efforts to strengthen oversight of the financial system and ensure that licensed financial institutions comply with extant laws and prudential regulations.

Here are the microfinance banks whose licenses were revoked:

Apple’s Hide My Email feature is a convenient privacy tool that uses disposable addresses to hide a user’s true email for the sake of online anonymity. Unfortunately, new research appears to show that a bug in the feature allows users’ real email addresses to be unmasked.

The bug was reported by 404 Media, which says that it has tested and verified that the vulnerability exists. Tyler Murphy, the researcher who found the bug, said that he warned Apple about the problem over a year ago, and that it was unclear why the company had yet to remedy the problem. All of the attempts to exploit the bug have been successful, Murphy added.

“We don’t know the full scope of the issue, but in our limited tests with volunteers, 100% of Hide My Email addresses were exploitable,” Murphy told the outlet. Details of the vulnerability haven’t been publicly disclosed, for fear that it will be exploited.

Murphy is the co-founder of EasyOptOuts, which offers a paid data removal service that takes your information off of data broker sites. He told 404 Media that “publicly accessible people-search sites make it easy to link an email address to other personal details, so people relying on Hide My Email for safety may be at risk.”

TechCrunch reached out to Apple for more information and will update this story if it responds.

When it comes to the tech world, privacy tools are hard to come by and, unfortunately, even when they do exist, they don’t always work. Apple has been accused of this sort of thing before.

Case in point: the company was sued in 2022 after it was reported that iPhone apps continued to send analytics data to Apple even when the iPhone Analytics privacy setting was turned on.

Similarly, in 2023, researchers found another one of Apple’s privacy features to be effectively “useless.” The research claimed that a tool that was supposed to anonymize mobile users’ WiFi connections by providing randomized MAC addresses (an easily trackable identifier) was simply exposing the user’s real MAC address.

Apple has built a large part of its reputation and branding on user privacy, so hopefully it manages to address the apparent Hide My Email bug with some expedience. If it can learn to better stand behind its privacy promises, that wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world either.