Nigeria’s rapid expansion of digital payments is facing a growing trust deficit, with transaction failures, poor dispute resolution and weak accountability emerging as bigger threats to confidence than fraud, cybersecurity and artificial intelligence, a new report has found.
The finding comes as Nigeria’s digital financial ecosystem processes more than N1.07 quadrillion in electronic payment transactions annually, underscoring the scale at which consumers, businesses and financial institutions now depend on digital channels to move money.
However, the report, “Trust Architecture in Platform-Led Finance: Structural Governance Imperatives for Nigeria’s Digital Financial Ecosystem,” by Bridgforte, warned that the growth in transaction volumes has not been matched by a corresponding strengthening of public confidence in the systems supporting them.
The assessment, based on insights from senior executives across banks, fintechs, payment infrastructure providers, regulators and development finance institutions, gave Nigeria’s digital financial ecosystem an average trust resilience score of 5.4 out of 10.
The report said the score should not be viewed as a neutral assessment, but as a warning from senior stakeholders with close knowledge of the performance and credibility of the country’s financial system.
“A middling score might appear inconclusive. It is not. These are the chief executives, board directors, and senior institutional leaders closest to the system’s performance and most invested in its credibility,” the report stated.
According to the report, Nigeria’s financial sector has largely overcome the technical challenge of moving money digitally but now faces the more fundamental task of convincing consumers to trust the systems facilitating those transactions.
“The question for Nigeria’s financial ecosystem is no longer how to move money. It is how to build the confidence that makes people willing to let go of cash,” it stated.
Transaction failures and service reliability ranked as the biggest threats to trust, ahead of dispute resolution, fraud, cybersecurity, data privacy and artificial intelligence.
The findings suggest that consumers’ confidence in digital financial services is shaped less by the sophistication of the technology and more by how institutions respond when things go wrong.
The report therefore argued that the quality of institutional response to failed transactions, disputed payments and service disruptions is central to sustaining confidence in digital finance.
It emphasised that trust should no longer be treated as an outcome of technological innovation, but as an operating foundation of the financial system.
“Trust is not a feature of the financial market. It is one of its operating conditions. The gap between what the system can do technically and what it can sustain in public confidence is the defining governance challenge of this phase of Nigeria’s financial development,” it said.
Beyond measuring trust, the report identified several structural weaknesses that could limit the resilience of Nigeria’s digital financial ecosystem.
It called for identity infrastructure to be treated as a foundational public utility, arguing that fragmented identity systems could weaken fraud prevention, customer protection and institutional accountability.
The report also identified weak collaboration and information sharing among financial institutions as another vulnerability, noting that fraud networks can operate across institutional boundaries while legitimate players often remain constrained by competitive barriers and limited intelligence-sharing mechanisms.
To address the challenge, it recommended mandatory sharing of fraud intelligence across relevant institutions and stronger coordination across the digital financial ecosystem.
The report further urged regulators to move towards more outcome-based and system-wide supervision, with greater focus on the resilience of the financial ecosystem as a whole rather than concentrating primarily on individual institutions.
It argued that as Nigeria’s digital financial system becomes increasingly interconnected, weaknesses in one part of the ecosystem can have consequences across multiple institutions and platforms.
