The third edition of the Payments Forum Nigeria (PAFON 3.0) convened at the Lagos Oriental Hotel in Lekki, bringing together bankers, fintech executives, telecom operators, and regulators under the theme "Fair Digital Payments as a Catalyst for Deepening Financial Inclusion in Nigeria." The forum featured more than 20 expert speakers and was free to attend, a deliberate choice consistent with its inclusion mandate. Sponsored by TeamApt (the parent company of Moniepoint) and PalmPay Nigeria, the forum surfaced sharp disagreements over the role of agent networks, the future of Nigeria's stalled central bank digital currency, and whether transaction data can substitute for traditional credit collateral.

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The Inclusion Numbers Don't Tell the Full Story

Nigeria's formal financial inclusion rate reached 64 percent in 2023, up from 56 percent in 2020, according to EFInA survey data. But the headline figure masks a fragmented reality. Only about 64.9 million Nigerians hold Bank Verification Numbers against an adult population estimated at 133 million. Approximately 14.3 percent of those BVNs are reportedly inactive, placing the effective count of meaningfully engaged holders closer to 55.6 million. Women account for 80.8 percent of the unbanked population, and just 46.7 percent of women own any financial account, compared to 62.4 percent of men. The two most-cited barriers in 2025 surveys are lack of income (38.2 percent of respondents) and high service costs (35.3 percent). Adding further nuance, 90.9 percent of adults now live near a bank, up from 72.4 percent in 2022, meaning physical proximity is no longer the primary barrier to financial access.

Yusuf Adeyemo, president of the Association of Mobile Money and Bank Agents in Nigeria (AMMBAN), told the forum that Nigeria's inclusion rate now exceeds 70 percent, crediting agent networks as the primary driver of that progress. His figure is higher than the EFInA number; analysts note that AMMBAN likely counts informal mobile money access that formal banking surveys do not capture, a methodological tension that neither organization has formally resolved. Either way, his underlying argument was pointed: new fintech products should not displace the more than 100,000 agents who form the last-mile layer for financial services in underserved communities. Pricing, transaction costs, and consumer protection matter more than product novelty, he said.

Adeyemo's position is not merely defensive. AMMBAN is currently running "Project #10million," a campaign targeting 10 million new mobile money account registrations through its 100,000-plus agent outlets, demonstrating that the agent network sees itself as an active driver of inclusion growth, not simply a legacy infrastructure to be protected.

Ihechukwu Ibeji, representing Uche Uzoebo (MD/CEO of SANEF Limited, the CBN-established facility underpinning Nigeria's agent banking ecosystem), added that financial literacy and public education must accompany the CBN's agent banking framework if expanded access is to translate into durable use.

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PalmPay Makes the Case for Embedded Finance

Chika Nwosu, managing director of PalmPay Nigeria, pushed back on narratives that frame the inclusion gap as an app availability problem. The real obstacle, he argued, is that legacy transaction infrastructure is structurally inefficient. Rural Nigerians often choose cash not because digital tools are unavailable but because failure rates and fees make digital transactions unreliable or expensive. PalmPay reported a transaction success rate of between 99.95 and 99.98 percent at the forum.

The company now serves 35 million users and processes more than 15 million transactions daily, having completed Nigeria's first live transaction on the NIBSS National Payment Stack in November 2025. The Financial Times ranked it Africa's fastest-growing fintech in 2025. Reports from June 2025 indicate the company is in talks to raise up to $100 million in new funding and is planning expansion into four additional African countries, signaling a trajectory that extends well beyond Nigeria. Nwosu's preferred solution is embedded finance: weaving payment functionality into platforms people already use rather than asking them to adopt standalone wallets. The approach mirrors how India's Unified Payments Interface has been integrated into everyday platforms such as WhatsApp, Jio, and Google Pay, enabling mass adoption by reducing friction rather than requiring behavioral change.

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"Data Is the New Collateral"

A representative speaking on behalf of Dr. Jameelah Sherrief-Ayedun, CEO of Credit Registry and VP of FintechNGR, opened the session with a statement that has become something of a rallying phrase in Nigerian fintech circles: "Data is the new collateral." The argument is that the path from payments to lending runs through data. Nigeria's informal economy generates trillions of naira in transaction volume annually. Structuring that behavioral data into credit intelligence, the argument goes, could open unsecured lending to the unbanked without requiring traditional collateral. India has pursued a comparable approach through its Account Aggregator framework, a consent-based data-sharing system that allows financial institutions to access a customer's transaction history across multiple providers, enabling credit decisions without conventional documentation. Bangladesh's mobile financial services ecosystem offers a parallel case.

Nigeria's challenge is that most of this transaction activity remains unstructured and has not been formally captured in credit systems. The degree to which fragmentation across platforms contributes to that gap is a question analysts continue to assess.

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The Stablecoin Question Nobody Can Avoid

A dedicated fireside session, organized in collaboration with Lagos Blockchain Week under the title "Stablecoins vs. eNaira: Orchestrating a Unified Digital Payment Rail for West Africa," directly addressed the tension between Nigeria's state-backed digital currency and privately issued stablecoins.

The eNaira, launched by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) in October 2021, has seen adoption near zero: only about 0.5 percent of Nigerians had used it by 2023, with 98.5 percent of wallets sitting inactive. The app was later pulled from Google Play entirely. Meanwhile, Nigeria leads the world in daily stablecoin peer-to-peer transfer volume, at $48.2 million per day in 2025. Stablecoins accounted for 43 percent of all Nigerian crypto transactions in recent measurements, with USDT representing more than 88 percent of that share. To put that trajectory in perspective, stablecoin deposits in Nigeria grew by approximately 9,000 percent between 2018 and 2025. Nigeria's total on-chain value reached $92 billion in 2025, a 56 percent year-on-year increase.

CBN Governor Olayemi Cardoso has signaled awareness of the gap, announcing the formation of a stablecoin task force at IMF/World Bank meetings, a public and internationally facing commitment rather than a quiet internal initiative.

Nigeria's first regulated naira-backed stablecoin, cNGN, issued by WrappedCBDC Limited, launched in 2025 under joint SEC and CBN oversight. The Investments and Securities Act 2025, enacted in March of that year, formally placed digital assets under SEC regulation and mandates reserve backing, AML and KYC compliance, and independent audits. Prof. Adewale Peter Obadare, CVO of Digital Encode, told PAFON that clear regulatory frameworks are prerequisites for blockchain adoption, not afterthoughts: safety, scalability, and investor confidence all depend on regulatory certainty arriving before, not after, scale.

Nigeria's regulatory posture is increasingly being read as a regional benchmark. The NIBSS-Zone blockchain integration, announced in August 2024, and the ISA 2025 together position Nigeria as one of Africa's more developed regulatory environments for blockchain. The CBN's 2026 Fintech Report explicitly targets ECOWAS-wide regulatory harmonization, an ambition that aligns directly with Prof. Obadare's call for frameworks that precede deployment rather than chase it.

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What Comes Next

The debates at PAFON 3.0 do not resolve neatly, but they reflect a real policy inflection point. The CBN's February 2026 Fintech Policy Insight Report proposed an expanded regulatory sandbox covering AI, cross-border payments, microfinance banks (MFBs), payment service banks (PSBs), and telecoms, along with a Single Regulatory Window intended to reduce licensing friction for new entrants. The report also proposed a Standing Fintech Engagement Forum, modeled on the Bankers' Committee, as a permanent channel between regulators and the private sector, and signaled ambitions for ECOWAS-level harmonization of cross-border licenses. Implementation is scheduled across 18 months in three phases.

The regional picture offers both caution and precedent. Kenya's experience shows how a dominant mobile money platform can evolve into a super-app ecosystem, with competitive dynamics that regulators elsewhere are still working to manage. Ghana's Mobile Money Interoperability program demonstrates that mandated interconnection between providers can accelerate inclusion without requiring a single state-owned instrument. Tanzania has pursued similar interoperability mandates with comparable results. Nigeria is arriving at these questions with more market complexity than any of its neighbors and with an informal economy large enough that the data-to-credit thesis carries particular force.

For builders targeting West Africa's payment corridors, for lenders looking at Nigeria's informal economy, and for regulators across the continent monitoring the eNaira's near-zero adoption, Lagos on April 24 offered a pointed signal. The forum's debates over agent networks, embedded finance, credit data, and stablecoins suggest that the next phase of Nigeria's financial inclusion story will be shaped less by whether digital infrastructure exists and more by who governs it, on what terms, and for whose benefit.