A major plank of Nigeria’s newly launched Payments System Vision 2028 is a hard target on fraud reduction, and the technology strategy behind it signals a significant upgrade to the country’s digital financial security architecture.
According to a Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS’) report, digital payment fraud in Nigeria stood at ₦25.85 billion in 2025, representing a 51 per cent decline from ₦52.26 billion the previous year.
CBN Governor Olayemi Cardoso, unveiling PSV 2028 in Abuja, set a target to reduce electronic fraud losses to below 0.001 per cent of total transactions by 2028.
Achieving that, he said, will require tighter integration of national identity systems, particularly the National Identification Number (NIN) and Bank Verification Number (BVN), combined with artificial intelligence-driven fraud detection tools.
“With NIN, BVN, intelligent systems, and AI fraud detection, people’s money must be safer in the digital system than under their mattresses,” Cardoso said.
The governor framed trust as a foundational issue, not a secondary concern. He argued that without confidence in the safety and reliability of digital payment platforms, gains in financial inclusion and adoption could stall regardless of infrastructure investments.
“A payment system is only as strong as the trust people place in it,” he said.
Jimoh Itopa Musa, CBN director of Payments System Policy echoed this, noting that trust was one of the three core barriers, alongside access and complexity, that had historically constrained financial participation in Nigeria.
He said PSV 2028 was designed to address all three, with security and system integrity running through every layer of the framework.
Beyond fraud, the vision also targets the expansion of open banking infrastructure. Cardoso said reforms in this area had already unlocked more than 100 Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), creating new channels for innovation and financial services development.
The CBN also signalled ambitions to turn Nigeria from a fintech adoption market into a production and export economy, one capable of generating internationally competitive fintech companies. Cardoso said Nigerian innovators should be building global fintech solutions from Lagos, Abuja, and Kano, using domestic data and infrastructure.
“If we do not tell the story, others will tell it for us,” he said, urging the sector to more actively project Nigeria’s fintech achievements on the global stage.
