Nigeria’s financial institutions have spent the last few years trying to become ‘everything’ apps, i.e., they want to serve customers and merchants, offer payments, banking, lending, and everything possible in the financial ecosystem. Nigeria’s Central Bank (CBN) has had a look at that trend and said not so fast.
Here’s what happened: In a circular released on Monday, the regulator outlined new sets of rules on who owns payment companies, where payment data is stored, and how much of the payments ecosystem any one player can control.
Tell us who calls the shots: The CBN now wants payment companies to disclose their ultimate beneficial owners—the people who control a business, even when ownership is buried beneath holding companies or some complex corporate structures.
Keep payment data at home: From January 2027, payment transaction data generated in Nigeria must be stored on servers located in Nigeria. The goal is visibility and control. If payment data lives abroad, regulators have less oversight over it. Now, that doesn’t mean every company must build its own data centre. Operators can use local cloud providers and data centre facilities run by Rack Centre, MainOne, Open Access Data Centres (OADC), MTN, and other local infrastructure providers.
You can’t dominate both sides of payments: This is the rule that could reshape competition. The CBN says any institution controlling more than 25% of the consumer payments market cannot hold more than 15% of the merchant acquiring market, and vice versa. This means that if a financial institution becomes dominant in consumer payments (bank accounts, cards, or wallets), it won’t be allowed to build an equally dominant position in merchant payments, which includes payment gateways and infrastructure or PoS terminals.
What’s all this for? Nigeria’s digital payments ecosystem processed ₦1.2 quadrillion ($884.78 billion) in 2025. These rules are CBN’s blueprint for keeping Nigeria’s payments ecosystem from becoming too dependent on foreign infrastructure or difficult to supervise.