Racing to Geo-tag POS in Nigeria: Why Legitimate Agents’ Economic Activities Need Protection.
Nigeria’s Urban-Rural Dichotomy and the Financial System Infrastructure Challenge Immanuel Umukoro, Policy and DFS Manager, EFInA On August 25th, 2025, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) released a circular on the Migration to ISO 20022 Standard for Payment Messaging and Mandatory Geo-Tagging of Payment Terminals. The geo-tagging objective was clear: all terminals should be tied to known locations so that suspicious movement could be detected more easily, and fraud investigations, dispute resolution, oversight, and […]
Nigeria’s Urban-Rural Dichotomy and the Financial System Infrastructure Challenge.
Nigeria’s Urban-Rural Dichotomy and the Financial System Infrastructure Challenge By Chioma Nwaiwu and Oluwatomi Eromosele Nigeria’s financial inclusion story reflects hard-won progress, but is overshadowed by a persistent divide. According to the A2F 2023 Survey, formal financial inclusion reached 64% in 2023, up from 56% in 2020 and approaching the National Financial Inclusion Strategy’s 65% formal inclusion target for 2024. Yet these national averages […]
Local Language Interfaces: A Critical Innovation Gap in Nigerian Fintech.
Local Language Interfaces: A Critical Innovation Gap in Nigerian Fintech By Oluchi Okafor Brand and Communications Manager, EFInA Nigeria’s fintech story is often told through the lenses of scale and speed. Agent networks reach every ward, and payments settle in seconds; signals of technical sophistication. Yet there is a fundamental design flaw in that almost all digital financial services in Nigeria operate exclusively in English, in a country of over […]
Communiqué: Promoting Consumer Protection and Confidence in Nigeria’s Financial Services Ecosystem
Communiqué: Promoting Consumer Protection and Confidence in Nigeria’s Financial Services Ecosystem Following the Ask the Regulator Virtual Consumer Protection Townhall on Thursday, December 11, 2025 The Ask the Regulator Virtual Consumer Protection Townhall was convened by Enhancing Financial Inclusion and Advancement (EFInA) as a live platform for Nigerian consumers to engage directly with regulators, industry leaders and consumer advocates […]
Beyond Access: Putting Financial Health at the Core of Nigeria’s Financial Inclusion Strategy
Nigeria’s Financial Inclusion Journey In a decade and a half, Nigeria has made undeniable progress. Formal financial access rose from 26% in 2008 to 64% in 2023, supported by three successive strategies: The first strategy document (NFIS 1.0, 2012–2018) sought to achieve a financial inclusion rate of 80% (by 2020), up from a baseline of […]
Insights from Financial Inclusion State Fact Sheet
Download
The State of Financial Health in Nigeria
How Social Dynamics Influence Agent Operations in Nigeria
On May 6, 2021, EFInA hosted a workshop to discuss an ethnographic study on financial service agents in Nigeria as well as some of the findings from the 2020 Financial Service Agent Survey. The ethnographic study explored how social factors and gender dynamics influence financial service agents’ business operations, customer engagement and agent deployment models. […]
EFInA’s Workshop on Sex-disaggregated Data for Women’s Financial Inclusion
EFInA collaborated with Data2X and Financial Alliance for Women to deliver a workshop on sex-disaggregated data for improved women’s financial inclusion. The objective of the workshop was to highlight insights on how Financial Service Providers (FSPs) can use sex-disaggregated data to develop and roll out products to key target groups, especially to open up new […]
FinTech Landscape and Impact Assessment 2020
Fintech Innovation is an important driver of financial inclusion and very useful in providing access to financial services, especially in underserved/unserved areas. In 2018, EFInA embarked on a journey to study the Nigerian fintech space because we understand the importance of innovative DFS for financial inclusion, this led to us conducting a foundational fintech study […]
