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.
