In the first half of 2007, Nigerians processed ₦946.22 million ($695,469) in point-of-sale (PoS) transactions. In the first quarter of 2025, that figure grew to ₦10.51 trillion ($7.73 billion).
The growth was the product of a series of policy decisions by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), which has spent nearly two decades trying to reduce the country’s reliance on cash and build a digital payments ecosystem through successive Payment System Vision (PSV) frameworks.
The first of those frameworks, (PSV) 2020, was launched in 2007 and focused on expanding electronic payments and modernising the country’s payment infrastructure. A second iteration, PSV 2025, followed in 2022, with a much stronger emphasis on financial inclusion, agent banking, interoperability, and the rails needed to support a digital economy.
PSV 2025 pushed formal financial inclusion to 64% from 56% in 2020. According to the CBN, agent banking networks expanded to more than two million agents nationwide, and electronic payment value has jumped by 203.51% since 2022 to ₦1.2 quadrillion ($880.51 billion) in 2025. The Bank Verification Number (BVN) system has also become a foundational digital identity layer with over 66 million unique IDs, the CBN noted.
