NigeriaPushing a local, digital-first agenda
Nigeria is entering a new era. The volatility of the naira and severe inflation that once defined its economy are fading. In their place, attention is turning to its enormous, youthful population, the largest in Africa. Nigeria had more births in 2025 than all of Europe combined. That young population is driving demand for local, digital-first ways to pay, with bank transfers, eWallets and homegrown card schemes becoming an important part of the mix.
The way locals pay
Local payment methods to know
Card
Online payments mix eCommerce 2026 projections
Past volatility is on the decline
In July 2026, headline inflation in Nigeria had eased to around 15%, down from a nearly 23% average in 2025 and a peak above 30% in 2024. The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) is targeting 13% by 2027 as the naira stabilizes.
A steadier naira means merchants, especially those selling imported goods, can reprice less often, and cross-border totals are less likely to shift between quote and payment. With less pressure to guard against tomorrow’s exchange rate, shoppers and merchants have less reason to hold dollars or stablecoins or to transact through parallel channels, keeping more payments on formal naira rails.
More than any other market in our latest retail survey, 55% of Nigerian shoppers say they would find a way to pay for something they wanted, often through eWallets or crypto, if their preferred method wasn’t available. This helps to explain why Nigerians are reaching for their own digital rails.
Verve: A local card for local payments
Verve is synonymous with Nigeria, but its reach now extends well beyond its home market to 12 African markets. More than 100 million Verve cards have been issued across Africa, making the home-grown scheme one of the continent’s largest card networks.
In Nigeria, domestic Verve transactions are processed in naira, keeping local payments in local currency rather than introducing the FX exposure associated with internationally routed transactions. For merchants, that scale makes Verve acceptance a baseline requirement: most of their customers are carrying one. The vast majority of those cards, however, work only domestically.
Nigeria’s payment mix is broadening beyond cards, with eWallets and account-to-account (A2A) transfers taking a growing share of transactions. Within the card segment, however, Verve remains dominant.
A2A keeps the lead
Today, most Nigerians pay online by bank transfer. A2A payments already make up around half of online transactions, and they’re set to become an even bigger part of how Nigerians pay in the next few years.
A2A runs entirely through direct bank integrations powered by the national interbank settlement switch, NIBSS, so shoppers are moving money straight from their own account rather than routing through a card or eWallet they have to top up first. This simplicity is a big part of why it’s the market’s leading digital payment method. And merchants like it because it doesn’t depend on card acceptance.
When one of our retail merchants in Nigeria added A2A to checkout, they immediately saw it become a growth driver. Within the first month, A2A captured 20% of TPV and brought in 23% of all new users. By month four, its TPV share had grown to 35%, and more than a third of every new customer was arriving through bank transfer alone. Cards fell from 33% to just 13% of TPV over the same stretch, while eWallets held roughly where they were.
- Bank transfer
- Cards
- eWallet
Within four months, the share of bank transfers grew from 20% to 35%, while overall TPV continued to rise, proving they reached shoppers other payment methods missed.
eWallets bring another kind of reach
eWallets are the fastest-growing rail after A2A, and are likely to climb from 20% in 2025 to 22% in 2028. OPay leads the category, with Paga close behind. Alongside others like Moniepoint and PalmPay, they’ve built their base around small, everyday purchases that bank transfers aren’t always built for, like buying airtime or ordering food or a ride. They can also be a better fit for recurring payments: OPay supports recurring payments, while bank transfers generally require the shopper to initiate each payment. For merchants, eWallets cover smaller, everyday payments and open up recurring use cases where bank transfers are less convenient.
And this shift toward local rails is helping the whole market grow. Local card schemes like Verve, alongside A2A and eWallets, give more Nigerians ways to pay online, helping merchants reach more users and convert more of them. Nigeria’s eCommerce market is expected to grow from US$ 6.4 billion to US$ 8.4 billion by 2028, with both domestic and cross-border volumes growing.
I think Nigerians will continue to guide the future of payments in the country. We’re a market heading towards 300 million people, so the opportunity is huge. We have a long history of finding ways to adapt, whether that means finding new ways to pay when the naira moves or adopting new payment methods when they make our life easier. I think there’s much more to come, and our job in the industry is to stay close enough to the ground to notice when something starts to take hold and alert enough to act on it.
Regulation moves forward
Nigeria’s payment rules are changing as fast as its payment habits. Over the past year, regulators have introduced a series of changes across payments, fintech and digital finance.
A faster, ISO 20022-based backbone connecting banks, fintechs and payment providers. Built for cleaner enterprise collections, payouts, refunds and reconciliation.
Consent-based data sharing, account verification, direct debit and embedded finance are arriving in stages, opening the door to richer checkout and onboarding experiences.
CBN has written AI into its anti-money-laundering framework, requiring banks, fintechs and payment companies to run automated AI/ML-based monitoring.
Inbound remittances now settle in naira, putting local pricing, FX management and treasury planning on the agenda for international businesses.
New opportunity alongside new obligation: tighter rules on data localization, fraud monitoring, market concentration and operational separation.
