Nigeria’s financial services system recorded electronic payment transactions to the tune of N1.07 quadrillion in 2024 – a point never witnessed in the country’s financial services history.
A quadrillion is an equivalent of N1,000 trillion – about $702.6 billion based on the closing exchange rate of N1,535/$1 on December 31, 2024.
According to the data released by the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS), the value recorded on the NIBSS Instant Payment (NIP) represents a 79.6 percent increase over the N600 trillion recorded in 2023.
While the e-payment data shows a steady increase throughout the 12 months of the year, the highest value was recorded in December.
There were reports that the countryside witnessed unusually high rates of e-payment transactions during the last festivities following the rapid expansion of major fintech firms – mainly Opay, MoneiePoint and Palmpay.
Being a festive period with lots of spending activities, Nigerians spent a total of N115.1 trillion over electronic channels in December 2024 according to the NIBSS data.
The volume of transactions processed by NIBSS for the year also jumped from 9.7 billion in 2023 to 11.2 billion in 2024 represents a 15.5 percent increase in the volume of electronic transactions year on year.
Finance experts believe that the surge in e-payment transactions can be linked to the recent cash crunch experience and the cashless policy of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) limiting the amount of cash that can be withdrawn daily.
The NIBSS Instant Payments (NIP) is an account-number-based, online real-time Inter-Bank payment solution developed in the year 2011 by NIBSS. It is the Nigerian financial industry’s preferred funds transfer platform that guarantees instant value to the beneficiary.
According to NIBSS, over the years, Nigerian banks have exposed NIP through their various channels, that is, internet banking, bank branches, Kiosks, mobile apps, Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD), POS, ATM, among others. to their customers.
