Information Technology and Accounting Information System in the Nigerian Banking Industry

Information technology has tremendously stimulated expansion of the banking networks and range of the offered services during recent years. The information technology has become a critical business resource because its absence could result in poor decisions and ultimately business failure. This study intends to find out the information technology influence on accounting information production in the Nigerian banking industry. Both primary and secondary data were used and Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) was used to test the hypothesis. Judgmental sampling method was used to obtain a representative sample of the population. Although for all Nigerian banks the efficiency has increased, the improvement of cost of efficiency is relatively much smaller than in the case of profit efficiency. It is also observed that accounting information technology can improve banks performance by reducing operational cost and by facilitating transactions among customers within the same or different network. It is, therefore, concludedthat accounting information technology is relevant in simplifying issues and in the provision of quality information in the Nigerian banking industry. That explains why the banks spend a greater part of their resources on information technology and consider its application as a comparative edge in the competitive banking industry. This paper recommends that the impact of the progress in accounting information technology on banking service should not lead to a very strong increase of cost of their processing, which put in question possibility to achieve economy of scale by Nigerian banks. Also all Nigerian banks should continue to utilize and upgrade their information technology for efficient service delivery and profitability.