🇳🇬 Payments in Nigeria

Nigeria checks out by bank transfer, not by card. The NIBSS Instant Payment (NIP) rail — operated by the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System, jointly owned by the Central Bank of Nigeria and the banks — is the backbone of the economy: it moved over 11 billion transactions in 2024. Most online checkouts present a one-time account or virtual-account transfer as the default path, and feature-phone users reach the same rail over USSD short codes. A checkout that only offers cards is fighting the way the country actually pays.

When cards are used, the domestic scheme leads. Verve (Interswitch) has more than 70 million cards in issue and over half of the domestic market, alongside Visa and Mastercard. Nigeria's “mobile money” is really a fintech-wallet ecosystem built on NIP: OPay, PalmPay, Moniepoint, Kuda and Paga serve tens of millions of consumers and merchants — a structurally different model from East Africa's telco-led mobile money.

Installments are a fast-growing layer at checkout: CredPal, EasyBuy, Carbon and Klump give shoppers split-payment and credit options, frequently embedded directly with large e-commerce platforms. For an enterprise merchant, the hard parts are off the checkout screen: naira settlement and FX repatriation under the CBN's post-2023 float, the prevalence of cash on delivery, and the fact that NIP access now runs through a licensed bank sponsor — all of which we carry locally.