#
Nigeria's standout rails are NIBSS Instant Payments (NIP) — the dominant account-to-account real-time system, ~70% of NIBSS volume, the first IPS in Africa to reach 'Maturity' on AfricaNenda's inclusivity spectrum — alongside QR (NQR), USSD and mobile money. The eNaira (Africa's first CBDC, launched October 2021) has seen minimal retail uptake (<0.5% adoption) and the CBN is repositioning it under the Nigeria Payments System Vision 2028 as cross-border/settlement infrastructure rather than a retail product, exploring NIP-eNaira integration, PAPSS/AfCFTA alignment and regulated-stablecoin settlement corridors. Open banking has formally launched, and the SEC ARIP sandbox supports crypto/stablecoin product testing.
In parallel, under the Nigeria Payments System Vision 2028 the CBN is repositioning the eNaira — Africa's first CBDC, launched October 2021, with under 0.5% retail adoption — as cross-border and settlement infrastructure rather than a retail product. It is exploring NIP–eNaira integration, PAPSS/AfCFTA alignment and regulated-stablecoin settlement corridors, leveraging more than US$20bn in annual diaspora remittances. Low retail uptake is attributed to BVN/NIN access requirements excluding the unbanked and overlap with existing payment apps. This pivot is carried at Assessed confidence.
Outlook
Product development is escalating. The strategically significant move is the eNaira's repositioning from a failed retail product toward cross-border settlement, a multi-year Vision 2028 horizon with implications for diaspora-remittance economics and regulated-stablecoin corridors.
Product Innovation & Market Development
The Central Bank of Nigeria's Fintech Policy Insight Report, published 2 February 2026, is the first sector-wide fintech policy review since the 2022 Payment Systems Vision 2025, and it sets the product and market-development direction for the current tightening cycle. The report proposes a Compliance-as-a-Service utility, intended to lower the compliance burden for smaller fintechs by centralising shared compliance infrastructure, and a Single Regulatory Window, aimed at reducing the number of separate touchpoints fintechs must navigate across Nigeria's multi-regulator landscape.
Notably, the report also encourages CBN engagement with regional central banks and economic blocs such as ECOWAS on regulatory harmonisation, signalling that Nigeria's payments regulator is thinking about cross-border product and regulatory coordination within West Africa, not only domestic market development.
The scale underpinning this policy review is substantial: the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System's Instant Payment platform processed close to 11 billion transactions in 2024, up from 5 billion in 2022, more than doubling in two years. This volume growth is the empirical basis the CBN itself cites for undertaking its first sector-wide fintech policy review since 2022, and it explains why product-innovation policy and structural market-tightening (the concentration caps) are proceeding on parallel tracks in the same period.
Outlook
Implementation of the proposed Compliance-as-a-Service utility and Single Regulatory Window remains at the proposal stage as of this cycle; whether and how the CBN moves these from policy report to concrete regulatory instruments is the key development to track. Any follow-through on ECOWAS-level regulatory harmonisation engagement would be a further significant product-and-market-development signal worth monitoring in subsequent cycles.
1 earlier distinct update(s)
Product Innovation & Market Development
Africa's first wallet-based outbound cross-border payment pilot launched from Nigeria this cycle. Onafriq and the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System launched an instant naira-to-cedi corridor between Nigeria and Ghana on 3 February 2026, structured as a six-month pilot approved by the Central Bank of Nigeria and operating without US-dollar or euro intermediation. PAPSS itself, which covers eighteen to nineteen African countries including Nigeria as of 2026 and settles intra-African payments in local currency via central-bank netting, is the underlying settlement infrastructure enabling the product.
As a product-innovation matter, the pilot's significance is that it is a genuinely novel payment-rail product rather than an incremental feature addition: a wallet-based, non-dollar-intermediated, instant cross-border transfer mechanism did not previously exist at scale for the Nigeria-Ghana corridor, and its explicit design target, reducing transfer costs from the historical seven-to-twelve-percent range toward the G20's three-percent benchmark by 2027, positions it as aimed at underserved small and medium enterprise trade-settlement demand rather than at retail remittance alone.
Separately and at lower confidence, a February 2026 Central Bank Fintech Policy Insight Report proposed a regulatory-sandbox test-then-codify pathway alongside digital-identity and credit-data-sharing reforms; if implemented, such a sandbox mechanism could provide a formal route for further product innovation of this kind, though this rests on a single Tier-4 source and no sandbox has yet been evidenced as operational.
Outlook
The pilot's six-month review point, expected around August 2026, will determine whether the wallet-based corridor model scales to further African trade pairings beyond Nigeria-Ghana; a positive review outcome combined with continued PAPSS network expansion would represent the clearest evidence yet of a durable shift away from correspondent-bank-dependent African cross-border payment infrastructure.
Sources and findings (5)
- T2https://www.africanenda.org/uploads/files/siips2025/siips_2025_NIP-Nigeria_CaseStudy_en.pdfretrieved
- T3https://bitcoinke.io/2026/06/the-nigeria-payments-system-vision-2028-framework/retrieved
- T3https://bitcoinke.io/2026/06/the-nigeria-payments-system-vision-2028-framework/retrieved
- T3https://www.goldsmithsllp.com/cbns-issues-draft-guidelines-on-handling-authorised-push-payment-fraud/retrieved
- T1https://www.cbn.gov.ng/PaymentsSystem/PSPs.htmlretrieved