CBPN is pleased to feature this exclusive series of contributions from three senior officials at the Central Bank of Nigeria’s Payments System Policy Department. Each article examines a different dimension of Nigeria’s payments modernisation under the recently published Payment Systems Vision 2028, from the economic case for interoperability, to the compliance-by-design philosophy shaping the regulatory framework, to the governance challenges of cloud adoption in a systemically important payments environment. Taken together, they offer an inside view of what it takes to translate a national payments vision into reality. Excerpts from each article appear below.
Interoperability as a National Imperative: Building the Rails for a Unified Digital Economy
Musa Itopa Jimoh, Director, Payments System Policy Department, Central Bank of Nigeria
The global conversation about payments is usually framed around speed, convenience, and emerging technology. Those dimensions matter, but they no longer capture what payment systems have become. They are now platforms for innovation, instruments of inclusion, and critical national infrastructure — closer in economic function to roads, ports, and power grids than to the back-office plumbing they were long assumed to be.
Nigeria’s numbers illustrate the scale of that shift. In the first quarter of 2025 alone, electronic payment transactions reached ₦284.99 trillion, up from ₦234.49 trillion in the corresponding period of 2024. Point-of-sale transactions nearly tripled over the same period, rising from ₦3.62 trillion to ₦10.45 trillion. Commerce, public services, tax administration, and everyday economic life increasingly run on these rails.
What is easy to miss in figures of that size is that they are not primarily the achievement of any single institution building a better product. They are the achievement of connection. A transfer that leaves a mobile money wallet and arrives in a bank account, a merchant who accepts a QR code without knowing or caring which provider issued it, a government agency that disburses to citizens across every channel at once — each of these is a small act of interoperability, and together they are what turns a collection of platforms into an economy.
That is the argument I want to make here: interoperability is not a technical objective that sits downstream of payments strategy. It is the … Read more
Compliance by Design: Building Nigeria’s Next Payments Decade on Trust
Dr. Nafisa Usman, Senior Manager, Payments System Policy Department, Central Bank of Nigeria
In June, the Central Bank of Nigeria published the Nigeria Payments System Vision 2028, the successor to the framework that has guided the country’s payments modernisation since 2020. It is tempting to read a document like this as a milestone — a box ticked, a strategy shelved. It is better read as a blueprint: a statement of what the ecosystem intends to build, and the conditions under which it intends to build it.
PSV 2028 did not emerge from a single institution. It reflects the collective work of regulators, banks, fintechs, payment service providers, industry associations, and development partners, all of whom share an interest in a payments system that is inclusive, secure, and digitally enabled. That collaborative authorship matters, because implementation will demand the same breadth of ownership that drafting did.
Across many markets, innovation and regulation are still framed as opposing forces — one pulling for speed, the other for caution. That framing is not just unhelpful; the evidence does not support it. Compliance by Design starts from a different premise: that trust is a product feature, not a compliance overhead. A payment product that treats consumer protection, data governance, financial integrity, and cybersecurity as design constraints from day one is not a slower product. It is a product that can … Read more
Banking on the Cloud: Why Regulation and Resilience Should Lead Nigeria’s Payments Journey
Dr. Chikelu Edison Oballum, Deputy Director, Digital Currency Management Division, Payments System Policy Department, Central Bank of Nigeria
Nigeria’s payments ecosystem is now among the largest and fastest-growing in the emerging market world. More than 200 million mobile connections and billions of electronic transactions a year move through a system that, five years ago, looked nothing like it does today. Instant payments have scaled. Digital identity has deepened, with more than 66 million Bank Verification Number enrolments underpinning customer verification. An agent network of more than 1.9 million access points has carried financial services into communities that formal banking never reached.
Beneath almost all of it sits infrastructure that rarely appears in the headline statistics: the cloud. Real-time payment engines, fraud analytics, digital identity systems, AI tools, and supervisory technology increasingly run on cloud platforms, and Nigerian institutions are adopting them at pace to scale services, reduce costs, and deepen analytics.
That momentum is not in question. What is in question is whether the systems being built on top of it are strong enough to withstand shocks, absorb volatility, and sustain public confidence when something goes wrong. For a central bank, cloud transformation is therefore not a technology decision. It is a decision about the kind of financial system a country intends to build — one resilient enough to keep functioning under stress, not only when … Read more
All three articles appear in full in the September 2026 issue of Central Bank Payments News. Subscribe or log in to access the complete issue!
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