On October 13, CashAfrica announced a partnership with Food Concepts, a quick-service restaurant firm, to introduce cellular tap-to-pay throughout Chicken Republic’s greater than 350 shops, as half of its effort to make the cost methodology extra extensively adopted in Nigeria.
If you’ve gotten taken a Lagos Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) bus, you’ve gotten most likely used tap-to-pay expertise. The blue Cowry card, operated by Touch and Pay Technologies (TAP) for Lagos’ transport authority, works throughout the 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 motive the system works is that the cardboard and expertise 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 dealing with contactless payments in Nigeria. The expertise 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 appropriate 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) exhibits that POS terminals processed 1.38 billion transactions price ₦18.32 trillion ($13.5 billion) in 2024. Cash has traditionally dominated how Nigerians pay, nevertheless it 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 should 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 fashion.
We’ve been right here earlier than
CashAfrica’s partnership with Chicken Republic just isn’t the primary try to make contactless cost a standard 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 towards a appropriate POS terminal. The tag could possibly be hooked up to a telephone or carried individually, and transactions had 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 instantly on NFC-enabled Android telephones with out a conventional POS terminal.
Each try solved half of the availability drawback, both by making appropriate units simpler to distribute or by making service provider acceptance factors simpler to deploy. Still, none created a compelling sufficient motive for shoppers and retailers to vary cost behaviour at scale.
There can also 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 protected. Nigeria’s contactless guidelines now put some boundaries round that threat. In 2023, the Central Bank of Nigeria issued guidelines masking the authentication and threat administration necessities for contactless payments. The guidelines enable transactions of as much as ₦15,000 ($11.28) with out further verification and a cumulative day by day restrict of ₦50,000 ($37.60).
The tap-to-pay methodology can also be competing with transfers, which have change into a well-recognized cost methodology in components of the nation.
By February 2023, because of the naira redesign policy and the ensuing money scarcity, forex 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% enhance from the earlier 12 months.
The money scarcity compelled Nigerians to search out one other technique to pay. Circumstances made the choice mandatory, and repeated use made it acquainted, and tap-to-pay has no equal forcing operate. Other cost choices are nonetheless obtainable, so being quicker alone just isn’t sufficient. The expertise 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 motive to change.
What tap-to-pay unlocks
Tap-to-pay can achieve floor throughout the already current POS community. NIBSS counted 8.3 million registered PoS terminals as of March 2025, some of which already help NFC. NIBSS can also be chargeable for certifying cost terminals and purposes 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 might change into 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 quite 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 chance 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 might assist shift extra transactions from money to the formal digital economic system, decreasing cash-handling prices and income leakage.
The cost methodology might 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 techniques have had few locations the place shoppers might use them. If tap-to-pay could make contactless authentication half of on a regular basis transactions, it might assist construct shopper belief in the cost methodology.
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