On October 13, CashAfrica announced a partnership with Food Concepts, a quick-service restaurant firm, to introduce cell tap-to-pay throughout Chicken Republic’s greater than 350 retailers, as half of its effort to make the cost technique extra broadly adopted in Nigeria.
If you will have taken a Lagos Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) bus, you will have most likely used tap-to-pay know-how. The blue Cowry card, operated by Touch and Pay Technologies (TAP) for Lagos’ transport authority, works throughout town’s highway, rail, and ferry networks. TAP says it has greater than 300,000 active users and has processed over 56 million transactions throughout its operations. The purpose the system works is that the cardboard and know-how are purpose-built for paying for transportation, and the contactless cost system is built-in into the journey, as commuters are required to faucet to pay earlier than boarding the bus.
It is a place to begin for understanding the problem going through contactless payments in Nigeria. The know-how for tap-to-pay just isn’t new. A contactless cost requires a buyer with a contactless card or near-field communication (NFC)-enabled machine, a service provider with a suitable terminal, and cost infrastructure that connects the transaction to the shopper’s financial institution or cost supplier.
Data from the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS) reveals that POS terminals processed 1.38 billion transactions value ₦18.32 trillion ($13.5 billion) in 2024. Cash has traditionally dominated how Nigerians pay, but it surely has been shrinking. Between 2014 and 2024, money transactions in Nigeria fell by 59%. What changed money transactions was digital payments.
This signifies that Nigerians don’t must be satisfied that they’ll pay digitally, since they already do. What they don’t seem to be but satisfied of is why they need to pay this manner.
We’ve been right here earlier than
CashAfrica’s partnership with Chicken Republic just isn’t the primary try and make contactless cost a traditional half of the cost course of in Nigeria. In 2015, Unified Payments, a Nigerian payments infrastructure firm, launched PayAttitude with six banks, together with Access Bank, UBA, Zenith Bank, Skye Bank, Diamond Bank, and FirstBank. The NFC-based service allowed clients to pay by tapping an NFC-enabled tag in opposition to a suitable POS terminal. The tag might be hooked up to a telephone or carried individually, and transactions have been linked to a pay as you go pockets.
In March 2025, Access Bank launched Tap to Phone with Visa, permitting retailers to just accept contactless card and machine payments immediately on NFC-enabled Android telephones and not using a conventional POS terminal.
Each try solved half of the availability drawback, both by making suitable units simpler to distribute or by making service provider acceptance factors simpler to deploy. Still, none created a compelling sufficient purpose for shoppers and retailers to vary cost behaviour at scale.
There can be a belief drawback. In a low-trust market like Nigeria, the place shoppers are cautious of cost fraud, eradicating a well-recognized safety step of PIN authentication can create friction about whether or not tapping is secure. Nigeria’s contactless guidelines now put some boundaries round that danger. In 2023, the Central Bank of Nigeria issued guidelines masking the authentication and danger administration necessities for contactless payments. The guidelines permit transactions of as much as ₦15,000 ($11.28) with out further verification and a cumulative every day restrict of ₦50,000 ($37.60).
The tap-to-pay technique can be competing with transfers, which have grow to be a well-recognized cost technique in components of the nation.
By February 2023, because of the naira redesign policy and the ensuing money scarcity, foreign money in circulation fell from ₦3.29 trillion ($2.47 billion) in October 2022 to ₦982.09 billion ($738 million). As Nigerians struggled to entry bodily money, digital payments surged to an all-time excessive of ₦600 trillion ($451 billion) in 2023, a 55% improve from the earlier 12 months.
The money scarcity compelled Nigerians to seek out one other option to pay. Circumstances made the choice needed, and repeated use made it acquainted, and tap-to-pay has no equal forcing perform. Other cost choices are nonetheless out there, so being sooner alone just isn’t sufficient. The know-how has to supply a bonus that transfers, playing cards and money don’t, and make the distinction so apparent that buyers and retailers have a purpose to change.
What tap-to-pay unlocks
Tap-to-pay can achieve floor throughout the already present POS community. NIBSS counted 8.3 million registered PoS terminals as of March 2025, some of which already help NFC. NIBSS can be liable for certifying cost terminals and functions deployed in Nigeria, which creates a standard infrastructure layer throughout the business. The POS agent who at present handles transfers, processes card transactions, or dispenses money may grow to be half of the tap-to-pay distribution community. The catch is {that a} terminal can settle for tap-to-pay and nonetheless have clients who would moderately make transfers.
Tap-to-pay suits into Nigeria’s cashless coverage agenda. When the CBN launched the coverage, it argued that the nation’s heavy reliance on money was pricey to handle, elevated the danger of theft and cash-related losses, stored cash exterior the formal monetary system, and restricted the effectiveness of financial coverage.
If tap-to-pay could make digital payments simpler on the level of buy, it may assist shift extra transactions from money to the formal digital economic system, decreasing cash-handling prices and income leakage.
The cost technique may additionally normalise extra superior kinds of authentication throughout payments, together with biometric authentication. Nigerian firms have already experimented with this. Access Bank announced a facial biometric payment system in 2020, whereas Accelerex, a Nigerian fintech, launched Pay with Fingerprint on NIBSS-certified biometric POS units in 2024. However, like earlier contactless makes an attempt, these methods have had few locations the place shoppers may use them. If tap-to-pay could make contactless authentication half of on a regular basis transactions, it may assist construct shopper belief in the cost technique.
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