For more than a decade, Nigeria’s fintech industry has been focused on one challenge: making digital payments faster, easier and more accessible. The effort has transformed how millions of Nigerians move money, with transfers that once took hours now completed in seconds and digital financial services reaching people who previously had little interaction with traditional banking.

The rapid growth has helped establish Nigeria as one of Africa’s leading fintech markets, attracting billions of dollars in investment and producing some of the continent’s most recognised technology companies.

By almost every measure, the industry has been a success. But for Deborah Onyibe, founder of fintech startup Ding!, that success has also obscured another opportunity.

“We’ve spent years making payments digital,” Onyibe said. “The next challenge is making them disappear.”

The distinction, she argues, is subtle but significant. While fintech companies have spent years improving what happens after a customer decides to pay, far less attention has been given to the experience leading up to the payment itself.

A typical purchase from a small business still involves several familiar steps. A customer requests payment details, the merchant shares a bank account number, the customer opens a banking application, manually enters the account details, confirms the recipient, completes the transfer, sends proof of payment and waits for confirmation.

None of those steps is especially difficult on its own. But together they have become a routine that consumers rarely question.

“People don’t notice friction they’ve repeated a thousand times,” Onyibe said. “Eventually inconvenience starts feeling normal.”

According to her, that normalisation has shaped how the fintech industry defines innovation.

Many companies now compete by offering faster transfers, rewards, lending products, investment services or broader financial access. While those represent meaningful improvements, Onyibe believes they seldom challenge the basic mechanics of how people initiate payments.

For her, that is where the next phase of innovation may emerge.

Before founding Ding!, Onyibe spent years helping technology companies grow through brand strategy. Her work included leading brand initiatives during Payday’s expansion beyond two million users and contributing to the launch of Payday 2.0 through a campaign built around a partnership with Starlink.

The experience, she said, taught her that customers rarely describe problems the way product teams do.

“They don’t say the onboarding flow has too many steps,” Onyibe said. “They just decide something feels stressful or inconvenient.”

That insight has shaped her approach to product design.

Instead of asking how software can offer more features, she said the better question is how technology can quietly remove work from the customer experience.

It is the philosophy behind Ding!, the company she founded to simplify account-to-account payments.

Rather than introducing another payment destination, the startup is building infrastructure that allows merchants to receive payments through a simpler identity that works across banks, fintech platforms and merchants.

Whether that vision succeeds remains uncertain. What is harder to dismiss, however, is the broader question it raises: how much of everyday commerce is built around habits rather than genuine necessities?

History suggests that many technologies consumers now regard as standard—including contactless cards, QR code payments, one-click checkout and digital wallets—were once viewed as unnecessary. Each eventually gained acceptance because it removed small moments of effort that millions of people had quietly accepted as inevitable.

Onyibe believes bank account numbers belong in the same category. Not because they no longer work, but because “working” is no longer the standard consumers expect.

“The companies that shape the next decade of commerce won’t necessarily move money faster,” Onyibe said. “They’ll make paying feel so natural that people stop thinking about the payment itself.”

The ambition reflects a broader argument about the future direction of fintech innovation. As Nigeria’s digital payments ecosystem matures, the next competitive advantage may not come from increasing transaction speed, but from removing the hidden friction that still surrounds everyday payments for consumers and small businesses.

For Ding!, that means questioning routines that many people have stopped noticing—and reimagining the payment experience so that it fades into the background of commerce rather than becoming another task customers have to complete.