The subsequent time a point-of-sale (PoS) agent asks for a financial institution card, inserting it might not be vital. Some Nigerian playing cards can already full transactions with a single tap.
TechCabal examined this at a native PoS service provider. Using a Verve debit card issued by way of ALAT, the digital banking platform of tier-2 Nigerian lender Wema Bank, the crew held the cardboard close to the terminal as an alternative of inserting it. The machine recognised the cardboard, requested a PIN, and allotted ₦1,500 ($1.11) from the ₦1,600 ($1.19) transaction, which included a ₦100 ($0.074) service provider charge. The money withdrawal went by way of with out the cardboard being inserted into the machine.
It was a small transaction, however it demonstrated a fee functionality already out there on some Nigerian playing cards and PoS terminals, but nonetheless unfamiliar to many shoppers.
The function is simpler to spot than it could appear. Look for a small contactless image on the cardboard or PoS terminal: 4 curved traces that resemble radio waves. The image is usually mistaken for the Wi-Fi emblem, however it indicators one thing totally different. On a card, it means the cardboard could make contactless funds; on a terminal, it means the machine can settle for them. The tap works by way of Near Field Communication (NFC), a know-how that lets units alternate information when they’re shut to one another.
Contactless funds usually are not new to Nigeria. In May 2015, Unified Payments, a Nigerian fee processing firm, introduced a Near Field Communication (NFC) fee answer.
In September 2022, world funds firm Mastercard, Nigerian industrial financial institution Providus Bank, French digital safety firm Thales, and African funds know-how firm Interswitch launched tokenised tap-to-pay options for smartphones and wearables, following 9 months of growth.
Now, Google Pay’s October 2026 market entry and a rising variety of homegrown fintech options are drawing renewed consideration to a know-how that has been in use in Nigeria for greater than a decade.
These developments might increase how Nigerians pay and obtain cash. Customers can use appropriate smartphones as an alternative of bodily playing cards, whereas retailers can flip NFC-enabled smartphones into fee terminals. Other corporations are exploring contactless funds linked to financial institution accounts and digital wallets. But wider adoption will rely on whether or not banks, retailers, and shoppers could make the know-how work in on a regular basis transactions.
From contactless playing cards to Google Pay
The most seen growth in Nigeria’s contactless funds market got here on October 28, when Mastercard and Interswitch introduced that eligible Mastercard holders might use Google Pay to make contactless funds with appropriate Android units.
The launch, announced at the 2026 edition of Moonshot by TechCabal, lets prospects add supported Mastercard playing cards to Google Wallet and pay at retailers with appropriate contactless terminals utilizing their telephones. Instead of presenting a bodily card, prospects authenticate on their cellphone and maintain it shut to the PoS terminal.
The partnership brings collectively three totally different components of the fee expertise. Google gives the digital pockets by way of which prospects retailer and entry their fee credentials. Mastercard gives the cardboard community and tokenisation infrastructure, whereas Interswitch connects collaborating card issuers to the processing and tokenisation capabilities required for the service to work.
The innovation lies in turning common NFC-enabled smartphones into fee units whereas current card networks proceed to deal with the transactions.
Interswitch is working with 5 Nigerian banks—GTBank, Wema Bank, ProvidusUnity Bank, Zenith Bank, and FirstBank—to increase tokenised funds throughout digital wallets and banking apps. But the partnership doesn’t give each buyer of these banks instant entry to Google Pay. Google’s printed record at the moment supports selected cards from FirstBank, GTBank, Providus Bank, UBA, and Zenith Bank.
Wema Bank, regardless of its involvement in Interswitch’s initiative, is absent from that record. So are Verve and AfriGO playing cards. Even prospects with eligible playing cards nonetheless want NFC-enabled Android telephones and retailers with appropriate contactless terminals. The rollout exposes a hole between the establishments constructing Nigeria’s tap-to-pay infrastructure and the shoppers who can use it right now.
Once customers have added and verified an eligible card on an NFC-enabled smartphone, they will tap at a local PoS terminal to make funds. For retailers, nonetheless, accepting contactless funds requires greater than an NFC-enabled terminal. Acquiring banks and fee processors should assist the transaction, and the terminal should recognise the client’s card community or digital pockets. A PoS machine can carry the contactless image and nonetheless reject sure fee strategies.
Nigerian fintech corporations are additionally working to increase the place prospects can tap and what they will tap with. CashAfrica, a funds startup, has introduced a contactless cell fee service in partnership with the fast-food chain Chicken Republic. Nearpays, one other Nigerian funds startup, is creating software program that permits retailers to settle for contactless funds immediately on appropriate smartphones.
Nearpays makes use of software-based point-of-sale know-how (SoftPOS) to flip an NFC-enabled Android cellphone into a fee terminal. A service provider enters an quantity within the Nearpays utility, and the client faucets a contactless card or supported machine in opposition to the cellphone. The software program initiates the transaction by way of the fee processing system.
“We’ve built a product that sits as a mediator and can communicate easily to both parties,” Nearpays founder and chief govt officer Victor Daniyan informed TechCabal.
According to Daniyan, Nearpays routes home card transactions by way of the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS), the nation’s fee change, and worldwide card transactions by way of Visa, with banking companions concerned in processing.
The mannequin might cut back one of many prices of accepting card funds: PoS {hardware}. Merchants with appropriate smartphones could give you the option to settle for funds with out buying one other machine, though processing charges, safety necessities, and settlement preparations nonetheless apply. Its industrial attraction will rely on whether or not these financial savings outweigh the prices of utilizing the service.
The strategy has gained floor past Nigeria. In 2025, Visa, the worldwide funds big, stated its Tap to Phone know-how processed over $33 billion in funds, underscoring the size of smartphone-based acceptance in different markets. But these figures supply no assure of comparable adoption in Nigeria, the place retailers and prospects have already got a acquainted various in financial institution transfers.
Together, Google Pay, CashAfrica, and Nearpays present how corporations are increasing contactless funds from each ends of a transaction. They are altering the units prospects use to pay, and the tools retailers want to settle for fee.
However, beneath these interactions, fee credentials nonetheless want to attain monetary establishments securely, with out unnecessarily exposing delicate account or card data.
What tokenisation adjustments, and what it doesn’t
A cellphone can imitate a fee card with out storing or transmitting the cardboard’s unique quantity throughout every transaction. That is without doubt one of the benefits of tokenisation, the safety know-how underpinning companies reminiscent of Google Pay, the newly launched product in Nigeria.
When a buyer pays with Google Pay, the cellphone doesn’t want to share the unique card quantity with the service provider. Instead, it makes use of a digital stand-in for the cardboard. That is basically what tokenisation does.
Think of it as giving somebody a spare key that works solely beneath sure circumstances, whereas maintaining the unique key secure. The token represents the client’s card, however it can’t be utilized in all the identical methods as the cardboard quantity it replaces.
When a buyer provides an eligible Mastercard to Google Wallet, the financial institution verifies the cardboard, and Mastercard’s Digital Enablement Service (MDES) helps create a token linked to the cellphone. Each fee additionally carries a distinctive safety code, referred to as a “cryptogram,” which helps the fee community verify that the transaction is genuine. The code adjustments with every transaction, making captured fee data more durable to reuse.
If the cellphone goes lacking, the financial institution or pockets supplier can disable its token with out essentially cancelling the bodily card.
Tokenisation works alongside NFC, however the two do totally different jobs. NFC lets the cellphone and PoS terminal alternate data when they’re shut collectively. Tokenisation helps hold the client’s unique card particulars out of that alternate. Banks and fee networks nonetheless verify and approve the transaction earlier than cash strikes.
Not each contactless card makes use of the identical token system as Google Wallet. Tokenisation additionally protects on-line funds, the place prospects don’t tap something.
For Nigerian fee corporations, the larger alternative could lie in increasing contactless funds past card networks.
Bank transfers already dominate a lot of Nigeria’s digital fee exercise. In its Payments System Vision 2028 (PSV 2028) technique doc launched in June, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) stated that internet and Internet transfers accounted for 51.9% of retail non-cash transaction volumes as of June 2024, in contrast with 28.5% for PoS transactions.
Nigerians have change into accustomed to paying immediately from their accounts, creating a industrial problem for any product that asks them to undertake one other fee methodology.
CashAfrica is making an attempt to construct on that behaviour by creating account-based tokenisation. Rather than requiring a buyer to maintain a bodily card, the corporate stated it can create a digital identifier (a token) linked to a financial institution or fintech account and use it to provoke contactless funds.
Malik Asamu, the corporate’s founder and chief govt officer, argued that the chance lies in adapting contactless infrastructure to a market the place shoppers are extra accustomed to utilizing accounts than playing cards.
“If we can build an innovation that allows us to tokenise accounts, like we do cards, that then means that you can tokenise an account in the same model that you tokenise a card,” Asamu informed TechCabal.
CashAfrica’s strategy differs from Mastercard’s card-tokenisation mannequin. Mastercard substitutes a card credential that already operates on its fee community. The fintech goals to make account balances accessible through a contactless fee expertise, which requires figuring out the account, authenticating the client, and initiating a transaction by way of collaborating monetary establishments.
The fee journey Asamu described, nonetheless, nonetheless entails an middleman pockets. Customers first switch cash within the CashAfrica Cash Mobile app, choose “Tap to Pay,” authenticate with a PIN or biometrics, and tap a appropriate service provider terminal.
That introduces a industrial hurdle. A buyer who already has cash in a checking account should transfer it into one other pockets earlier than paying. For somebody accustomed to making an on the spot switch from a banking app, the extra step might offset the comfort of tapping a cellphone.
CashAfrica’s longer-term ambition is to make contactless funds out there by way of current banking and fintech purposes.
Tokenisation protects card particulars, however it can not forestall all types of fee fraud. EMVCo, the worldwide physique that units fee know-how requirements, stated the know-how limits what criminals can do with stolen card data.
However, in Nigeria, fraud more and more depends on tricking prospects into revealing delicate data or gaining unauthorised entry to their accounts. According to NIBSS, monetary establishments lost ₦25.85 billion ($19.2 million) to digital payment fraud in 2025, whilst losses fell by 51% from the earlier yr.
NIBSS famous that social engineering, account compromise, SIM-swap fraud, and phishing are among the many business’s greatest threats. A token can defend a card quantity, however it can not cease a buyer from being tricked into approving a fraudulent fee.
Regulation introduces one other constraint. Under the CBN’s June 2023 guidelines, contactless funds by way of accounts and wallets can proceed without additional verification up to ₦15,000 ($11.14) per transaction and ₦50,000 ($37.14) cumulatively per day. Higher-value transactions require acceptable verification and authorisation, with additional restrictions making use of above the day by day threshold.
Tokenisation could make digital fee credentials safer to use throughout units. But it can not, by itself, make banks combine with new fee companies, persuade retailers to settle for them, or persuade prospects to abandon fee strategies they already know and belief.
Will extra Nigerians tap?
Nigeria’s digital funds market continues to increase. In 2025, the CBN stated that digital fee transaction volumes rose by 2.6% to 47.88 billion, up from 46.65 billion the earlier yr. The worth of those transactions elevated by 26.1% to ₦4.36 quadrillion ($3.28 trillion), from ₦3.46 quadrillion ($2.6 trillion) in 2024.
Nigeria’s rising digital funds market offers contactless suppliers a giant buyer base to probably convert, however not essentially a prepared market. Bank transfers already permit prospects to pay retailers immediately from their accounts, usually with out a card or PoS terminal. A tap—whether or not utilizing smartphones, playing cards, or other wearables—should supply a noticeable benefit in pace, comfort, or reliability to change that behaviour.
The United Kingdom presents an instance of how that shift can occur. Contactless funds accounted for simply 3% of all UK transactions in 2015. A decade later, they accounted for 39% of funds, with 19.2 billion recorded in 2025, according to UK Finance.
Years of funding in on a regular basis acceptance underpinned a lot of the expansion that contactless funds skilled within the UK. In 2012, London’s transport authority introduced contactless bank card payments on buses and prolonged them to the Underground and rail community in 2014.
Commuters might pay fares utilizing playing cards they already owned, with out acquiring a separate journey card, and benefit from the same fares and day by day caps out there by way of the Oyster system. By 2017, passengers had made more than one billion contactless journeys throughout London’s public transport community.
The wider banking business additionally made the know-how simpler to use. Banks issued extra contactless playing cards, retailers put in appropriate terminals, and fee limits elevated to accommodate extra purchases. By the top of 2024, 89% of playing cards in circulation within the UK supported contactless payments, in accordance to UK Finance.
The UK instance means that adoption is dependent upon giving prospects frequent alternatives to tap, with out requiring them to change how they maintain or entry their cash. Public transport helped set up the behavior, whereas widespread card issuance and service provider acceptance introduced the know-how into on a regular basis purchasing.
Nigeria already has its personal instance of contactless funds turning into routine. In Lagos, commuters use Cowry playing cards to tap onto regulated buses, trains, and ferries. Touch and Pay, the fintech working the system, stated it had surpassed 5 million customers by 2025 and reported processing over ₦20 billion ($14.9 million) in transactions in 2024.
But Cowry operates by way of a devoted transport fee system: commuters both load funds onto a bodily card and tap it at transport terminals, or fund their Cowry account and pay utilizing the app’s fast response (QR) code scanner. Participating transport operators settle for each strategies.
Extending contactless funds throughout atypical retail transactions presents a totally different problem as a result of banks, card networks, and retailers should assist appropriate fee strategies.
Google Pay, CashAfrica, and Nearpays are trying to convey contactless funds into on a regular basis transactions, however wider acceptance alone might not be sufficient to persuade Nigerians to change how they pay.
Nearpays’ proposition is partly concerning the service provider. The fintech’s answer lets NFC-enabled smartphones settle for contactless funds with out a {hardware} PoS terminal, probably decreasing the barrier to entry for companies that need to settle for card funds.
But the profit to prospects is much less clear-cut. In our ₦1,500 ($1.11) withdrawal take a look at, tapping the Verve card eradicated the necessity to insert it into the terminal, however the transaction nonetheless required a PIN.
Yet, for tap-to-pay to acquire floor past transport and change into commonplace in retail funds, safety can’t be compromised in pursuit of comfort, particularly at its present early stage of adoption.
With the pace benefit probably amounting to mere fractions of a second over current digital fee strategies, and authentication nonetheless required in some circumstances, tapping could battle to supply Nigerians a compelling reason to change how they pay. Without a clearer benefit, it dangers remaining simply one other cool approach to make a fee.
