In a Lagos market, a tomato seller now accepts transfers, taps, and QR codes with the same ease she once reserved for cash. That ordinariness is the real revolution.

Over the past decade, Nigeria has engineered interoperability into its payment system so that a wallet can pay a bank account, a QR code can talk to any app, and a merchant can serve customers from anywhere. The result: cashless transactions hit ₦611 trillion in 2023 and surged to about ₦1.07 quadrillion in 2024 as real-time transfers became the default way to pay.

Interoperability breeds competition. Because every licensed provider can reach every account, firms compete on price, reliability, user experience, and security—not on gatekeeping access. That dynamic powers the instant payments network (NIP), where billions of real-time transfers flow each year, putting Nigeria among global leaders. It is why merchants from petrol stations to roadside kiosks now treat digital payments as routine.

The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) amplified this with its Payments System Vision 2025, which enshrines interoperability as a core principle, and with rules mandating that issuers, acquirers, and switches must connect seamlessly. These quiet policy choices made the rails work like public infrastructure.

The social payoff is just as clear. Financial inclusion rose to 64% in 2023 (from 56% in 2020), while exclusion dropped to 26%. Tens of millions more Nigerians can now send, save, or get paid digitally. Government transfers move faster, informal businesses formalise, and women—often excluded—gain safer ways to transact and build credit footprints.

But one bottleneck threatens these gains: de facto exclusivity in domestic card processing. Industry insiders note that Verve and AfriGo are tied to proprietary switching, blocking rival processors. That denies merchants and consumers the benefits they enjoy elsewhere: least-cost routing, redundancy when a processor fails, and true price competition. It’s a quiet form of rail capture that raises costs, concentrates power, and stifles innovation.

This is not how Nigeria treats other networks. Visa and Mastercard transactions route through multiple processors, giving acquirers a choice. Nor is exclusivity consistent with CBN’s own frameworks: QR rules mandate full interoperability, and open-banking guidelines widen access, not restrict it. Cards should be no different.

The fix is straightforward:

• Mandate scheme-neutral switching for domestic cards. Any licensed switch meeting standards should process Verve and AfriGo transactions.
• Separate scheme governance from processing services to prevent self-preferencing.
• Publish quarterly metrics on card uptime, routing, and fees—sunlight that drives competition.

The urgency is clear. In 2023, e-payments crossed ₦600 trillion; by 2024, 11 billion transactions ran on NIBSS rails. Momentum compounds when every new wallet, merchant, or app strengthens the network. Exclusivity does the opposite—it fragments the graph and raises costs.

Interoperability is not a slogan; it is the constitutional principle of digital economies. Nigeria has already proven what open rails can achieve. Keeping card processing as open as transfers is the logical next step—to lower costs, harden resilience, and ensure that the tomato seller in Lagos never has to ask which logo her customer carries before she gets paid.

The country built the freeway. Now, we must keep every lane open.