Why trust has become Nigeria’s next digital payments challenge

Nigeria no longer has a payments problem. It has a trust problem.

That is the central argument of a new report by Bridgforte, a policy research institute, published in partnership with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Innovation Hub in Lagos, which argues that confidence in Nigeria’s financial system is now determined less by how quickly money moves than by how reliably the system responds when something goes wrong.

The country processed more than ₦1.2 quadrillion ($880.51 billion) worth of transactions in 2025, according to the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), making it one of the world’s busiest real-time payment markets.

But as digital payments become the default way millions of Nigerians move money, a different challenge is emerging. Success has exposed the system’s weakest point: trust.

“Service reliability and dispute resolution are the primary drivers of confidence erosion, far outweighing concerns about fraud, data privacy, and artificial intelligence,” the report stated.

After decades of expanding access to financial services, policymakers are now asking a different question: not whether Nigerians can make digital payments, but whether they trust the system enough to keep using it.

Since establishing the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System Plc in 1993, Nigeria has invested in payment rails, digital identity, fintech regulation and real-time settlement infrastructure. Those investments have helped create a financial ecosystem that processes billions of transactions each year.

Formal financial inclusion has risen alongside that infrastructure. According to Enhancing Financial Innovation and Access (EFInA)’s 2023 Access to Financial Services Survey, 64% of Nigerian adults now use formal financial services, reflecting years of expansion by banks, fintech companies and mobile payment providers.

Aishah Ahmad, founder of Bridgforte and former Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), told TechCabal that infrastructure alone cannot produce confidence.

“One of our essential ideas is that trust in financial services is an architectural outcome of the system,” she said. “We have to create governance frameworks that produce and sustain trust consistently because of how interconnected the financial system has become.”

As transaction volumes increase and more consumers depend on digital finance for everyday activities, failures become more visible and more costly.

“The fundamentals of banking are about trust,” said Uzoma Dozie, chief executive officer of Sparkle, a Nigerian fintech, during a panel discussion at the report’s launch on Tuesday.

One of the report’s central arguments is that trust failures are operational before they become technological.

A single digital payment can pass through identity verification services, payment switches, banks, fintech applications, payment gateways, merchants and application programming interfaces (APIs) before reaching its destination. To consumers, it is only a single transaction.

“Customers experience the financial system not as an institution, but as a collective,” Ahmad said. “If they engage with one institution and are unhappy, it erodes their confidence in the entire system.”

Whether a failed payment originated from a bank, payment switch, fintech platform or network provider matters little to the consumer. What remains is the memory of a failed transfer, delayed reversal or unresolved complaint.

The report argues that this explains why operational failures increasingly shape public confidence more than emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence.

The regulator has reached a similar conclusion. The CBN anchored its payment vision for 2028 on six guiding principles, including trust. The regulator argues that Nigeria’s challenge is no longer just expanding digital access but also strengthening consumer confidence in the systems people already use.

An Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) survey published in 2024 found that 84% of consumers experienced at least one challenge while using digital financial services. Poor network quality affected 44% of respondents, while unexpected charges and fraud each affected 23%.

“In all, Nigeria’s PSV 2025 expanded digital access but exposed weaknesses in redress, literacy, and high fraud losses, showing that inclusion without trust is fragile,” the PSV read.

To address that challenge, the regulator has set an ambitious target of achieving an 80% trust index score by 2028. It also plans to introduce quarterly public scorecards alongside a National Payments Trust Index to measure confidence in the financial system.

Ahmad notes that if trust is not fixed, everyone in the financial ecosystem pays for it.

“Access has advanced,” she said. “But as you succeed, you start to see patterns in your success. People are engaging with the system, but they are not doing that consistently, and usage could be better.”

Diane Karusisi, chief executive officer of Bank of Kigali, Rwanda’s largest commercial bank, argued that trust is ultimately built during moments of failure rather than success.

“Access to finance is not an end in itself. What we want is outcomes. We want people to grow, to start building wealth,” she said during the panel discussion. “Trust is earned when there is a failure, and you are able to walk through the failure with your customers.”

Trust determines whether digital finance becomes habitual. Consumers who expect failed transfers or lengthy dispute resolution are more likely to keep cash, avoid unfamiliar financial products or revert to physical channels. Over time, that weakens transaction volumes, slows financial inclusion and reduces the return on years of investment in digital infrastructure.

“When it goes wrong, we see a lot of wasted investments,” Ahmad said. “Who pays for a lack of confidence? Today, we all do. In some of the challenges we see about cash usage and the lack of confidence.”

To fix some of the trust issues existing in the financial space, she argues that collaboration must now extend beyond building shared infrastructure to include fraud intelligence, cybersecurity, operational resilience and dispute resolution, areas where failures at one institution increasingly affect confidence across the entire ecosystem.

“The coordination that got us here has to evolve with the interconnected system we see today,” Ahmad said.

Bridgforte also recommended creating a longitudinal trust barometer that tracks what strengthens and weakens consumer confidence over time. “We have recommended that we do a longitudinal barometer to check over time what enhances trust and what erodes trust with consumers,” Ahmad said.

For her, the larger question is whether governance can evolve as quickly as innovation has.