Nigeria’s payment revolution: How NIBSS, CBN are building Africa’s most robust digital infrastructure

Nigeria’s payment system has experienced dramatic growth over the past decade, driven by regulatory reforms from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and technological innovation by the Nigeria InterBank Settlement System (NIBSS).

The backbone of the country’s realtime payments infrastructure is the NIBSS Instant Payments (NIP) platform, launched in 2011 to enable instant interbank transfers across banks, mobile apps, pointofsale (PoS) terminals, ATMs and USSD channels. 

NIP now processes billions of transactions annually and operates 24/7 with most transactions settling in under one second, underscoring notable improvements in speed and reliability over earlier systems.

In 2024, electronic payment transactions in Nigeria reached an alltime high of approximately ₦1.07 quadrillion (about $702 billion), representing nearly an 80 percent increase from ₦600 trillion in 2023.

The volume of transactions processed rose from 9.7 billion in 2023 to approximately 11.2 billion in 2024, a 15.5 percent yearonyear increase, reflecting growing adoption of digital channels by individuals and businesses.

The NIP platform alone handles the bulk of these instant payments, with active accounts and user reach expanding to cover a substantial share of Nigeria’s adult population, enabled by interoperability across nearly all banks and financial institutions.

This growth has not been uniform or without challenges; cash still plays a role in the Nigerian economy, but regulatory initiatives such as revised cashless policy limits on withdrawals have nudged users toward electronic channels.

Despite infrastructure challenges such as periodic network and power constraints, the system’s operational uptime and settlement speeds have steadily improved, and NIBSS continues to upgrade messaging and interoperability standards, including transitioning towards ISO 20022 compliance.

Nigeria’s payment system has also earned regional recognition. In 2025, NIP became the first instant payment system in Africa to reach the “mature” level on the AfricaNenda Inclusivity Spectrum, a framework that assesses functionality, governance, accessibility and consumer protections.

This rating places Nigeria at the highest tier among African instant payment systems, ahead of peers in markets such as Ghana and Kenya.

In strict quantitative terms, Nigeria’s payment infrastructure is larger and more active than that of most African economies, although adoption rates in some segments (e.g., mobile money accounts) remain lower than leaders like Ghana.

Independent research suggests that Nigeria leads in formal account ownership and formal savings but trails in mobilemoney penetration relative to some West African peers.

When compared with Western payment systems, Nigeria’s infrastructure is rapidly modernising but remains less deep in overall volume and global integration.

Systems such as the U.S.’s  FedNow and Europe’s TARGET Instant Payment Settlement (TIPS) benefit from long histories of automation, extensive connectivity with global financial markets, and mature fraud-prevention ecosystems backed by decades of investment.

These Western systems often operate with highly standardised global security protocols, dense bank interconnectivity and broad merchant acceptance, which Nigeria’s system is aspiring toward but has not yet fully matched.

In contrast to Western and African peers, Asia’s payment ecosystems, particularly India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) operate on a vastly larger scale. UPI, launched in 2016, is today the world’s largest realtime payment system by transaction volume, processing tens of billions of transactions per month and accounting for a significant share of all global realtime digital payments.

UPI’s platform handles hundreds of millions of transactions daily with deep integration into everyday commerce, financial services and merchant acceptance, far exceeding Nigeria’s current transaction volumes.

Nonetheless, the pace of growth in Nigeria is notable.

The transition from hundreds of millions of transactions per year in the early 2010s to more than 11 billion per year by 2024 reflects a compound annual growth rate that is among the fastest globally for a realtime system, showcasing the robustness of the underlying rails despite broader infrastructural constraints.

Regulatory oversight by the CBN remains a cornerstone of system resilience.

The apex bank’s policies on transaction charges, fraud mitigation, interoperability mandates and data standards have helped maintain system integrity while promoting financial inclusion.

The introduction of digital currency rails such as the eNaira in 2021, although adoption has been modest, further demonstrates CBN’s strategic commitment to diversifying payment channels and reducing dependence on cash.

In summary, Nigeria’s payment system, anchored by NIBSS and guided by CBN policy, is robust and continues to strengthen. Its realtime infrastructure ranks among the most advanced in Africa, with rapid growth in transaction volumes and increasing inclusivity.

While it does not yet match the scale of Asia’s leading systems or the integration depth of mature Western rails, the trajectory shows sustained improvement in reliability, coverage and economic impact.

Continued investment in technology, governance, crossborder interoperability and security will be key to closing the gap with global benchmarks.

Ogochukwu Onwaeze, a business and finance journalist, writes from Lagos.