Nigeria’s digital banking revolution is raising the stakes for consumer trust. The question is whether the industry is rising to meet them.
Nigeria’s relationship with digital banking has changed almost beyond recognition in a decade. Where cash once dominated every transaction, from the roadside market to the corporate boardroom, mobile apps, instant transfers and USSD codes have reshaped how tens of millions of Nigerians interact with their money every single day.
The figures speak for themselves: point-of-sale transactions surged to a record N18 trillion in 2024, a 69 per cent increase from the year before, and the number of POS terminals in operation more than doubled to 5.5 million. Mobile banking is now the most widely used digital financial service in the country, with four in five users having accessed it within any given 90-day window.
This is, by any honest measure, an extraordinary story of financial inclusion and technological adoption. But it is an incomplete story if told without its other half.
Behind the growth curves and transaction volumes, a quieter and more troubling story has been unfolding. According to the 2024 Nigeria Consumer Protection Survey published by Innovations for Poverty Action, nearly one in four digital financial services users reported experiencing unexpected fees, charges or fraud attempts in the past year. Of those who encountered a problem, only half sought any form of formal redress. That silence is not apathy. It is the sound of eroded confidence: customers who have concluded that raising a complaint is unlikely to produce results.
The fraud data from the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System tells the same story from a different angle. Actual losses to digital payment fraud rose to N52.26 billion in 2024, a figure inflated significantly by a single N31.1 billion incident involving one institution but still representing a 196 per cent increase in fraud losses over five years, even as the number of individual cases declined.
The decline in case counts is not reassurance enough. It suggests that while fraudsters are making fewer attempts, they are making each one count considerably more.
By channel, e-commerce and internet banking remain the most exposed, followed by point-of-sale, mobile and web platforms.
