Nigeria’s Central Bank has published its most ambitious overhaul of the country’s payments system yet, laying out a three-year blueprint to bring the vast majority of adults into the formal financial system, modernize digital infrastructure, and position the country as a regional hub for cross-border transactions.
The Nigeria Payments System Vision 2028, released by the CBN under Governor Olayemi Cardoso, sets a target of 95% formal financial inclusion by 2028 — up from roughly 74% today. It also aims to grow the share of adults actively using digital payments from 52% to 80%.
The document arrives as Nigeria’s payments ecosystem is already processing over a quadrillion naira in electronic transactions annually, riding on more than 200 million mobile subscriptions.
The question is whether the country can move past the structural weaknesses that still hold it back.
What Was Accomplished — and What Was Not
The PSV 2028 builds on the previous Payments System Vision 2025, which delivered notable wins. The Bank Verification Number (BVN) system now covers 66 million unique digital identities.
A network of 1.9 to 2.0 million banking agents spans every local government area in the country. Contactless payments, open banking frameworks, and a regulatory sandbox for fintechs were all introduced under PSV 2025.
In June 2025, the CBN launched the National Payment Stack, replacing the legacy NIBSS Instant Payments infrastructure and migrating to the ISO 20022 global messaging standard — a significant technical upgrade that the new vision aims to build on.
But PSV 2025 also left unfinished business. Fraud and cyberattacks are rising.
About 26% of bankable adults remain financially excluded. Rural infrastructure — power, internet, POS coverage — is still unreliable. And a fragmented regulatory environment continues to complicate operations for fintechs and oversight for regulators alike.
Five Pillars, One Deadline
The PSV 2028 is organized around five strategic themes: infrastructure and interoperability; digital financial inclusion and consumer protection; innovation, digital assets, and emerging technologies; cross-border payments and CBDC integration; and regulation, risk management, and cybersecurity.
On infrastructure, the CBN wants 99.999% system uptime from all licensed payment operators, a 95% transaction success rate, and response times under 30 seconds on customer-facing channels. Full interoperability across all licensed payment service providers is also a stated target.
On digital identity, the Vision calls for 95% of financially active adults to hold verified, linked NIN-BVN digital IDs — a necessary step toward enabling what the CBN describes as “biometric and invisible payments,” where transactions are authenticated passively through facial or fingerprint recognition without requiring manual input.
The CBDC and Stablecoin Agenda
One of the more consequential sections of the document concerns the eNaira and broader digital assets. The CBN intends to deepen use of its central bank digital currency for cross-border transactions, piloting eNaira interoperability with other CBDCs under ECOWAS and the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS).
The Vision also addresses stablecoins directly, including a classification and compliance framework for stablecoin issuers. The CBN would require its own observer nodes in any blockchain network operating approved stablecoins within Nigeria — a notable regulatory assertion in a market where dollar-denominated stablecoins have surged in use as a workaround to naira volatility and FX scarcity.
Cross-border remittances are another focal point. Nigeria is one of Africa’s largest remittance recipients, yet the cost and speed of transfers remain a persistent complaint.
The PSV 2028 calls for fintech-led cross-border wallets operating within regulated foreign exchange liquidity frameworks — and explicitly calls for lower remittance costs, though specific targets are not defined.
Inclusion Gaps Are Still the Hard Problem
Despite headline inclusion numbers improving, the CBN acknowledges that the gains have not been evenly distributed. Women, youth, rural residents, informal workers, and small businesses remain underserved. The PSV 2025 literacy programs, the document concedes, were largely urban-focused and limited in reach.
The new vision promises nationwide financial literacy campaigns, offline-capable wallets for areas with poor connectivity, and micropayment solutions designed for low-income users. Government-to-person payments and subsidies are also to be fully digitized through what the document calls “programmable channels.”
Whether these commitments translate into outcomes will depend heavily on private-sector delivery. Previous financial inclusion targets have often been met on paper — by expanding the definitions of “access” — without substantively reaching the populations they were designed to serve.
Governance and the Implementation Question
The PSV 2028 will be overseen by a steering committee drawing from both public and private sector stakeholders, supported by technical working groups across each thematic area. The CBN has also committed to annual progress reviews and a monitoring framework tied to specific KPIs.
The document is frank about execution risks: infrastructure deficits, low digital literacy, rising cybersecurity threats, and regulatory complexity are all named as real obstacles. A National Payment Security Operations Centre is planned to coordinate fraud intelligence and incident response across the industry.
Nigeria’s payments story over the past decade has been one of genuine, sometimes underappreciated, progress. The challenge for PSV 2028 is converting a well-designed roadmap into the kind of ground-level change that reaches a subsistence farmer in Kebbi State as much as a fintech user in Lagos.
