Nigeria leads on payments and fintech in Africa, and that isn’t a conversation that needs an argument. It’s anchored on world-class payments system visions and the rigorous implementation that comes with them.
The Central Bank of Nigeria has been at this for almost twenty years, and it’s genuinely good at it. The first vision came in the mid-2000s; the last one launched in November 2022, and between them they took a country where most adults had no bank account, and cash settled almost everything, and turned it into one of the few places on earth where you can send money to a stranger and watch it land in seconds. We built a real financial identity in the Bank Verification Number (BVN), an agent network of close to two million touchpoints, and an instant-payment system the rest of the continent studies, and we now move well over a quadrillion Naira a year through electronic channels.
PSV 2028 is the next installment, and it’s ambitious, which is the polite way of saying the CBN has handed itself roughly thirty months to deliver a list that would stretch a far simpler country. There’s plenty to like, a few things I’d argue with gently, and a couple of things I wish were in it that aren’t. Thirteen points, in that order.
