Virtual accounts are rapidly becoming the dominant payment infrastructure for Nigerian businesses, overtaking cards as merchants prioritise reliability, instant settlement, and easier reconciliation, according to transaction data from fintech firm Nomba.
The Lagos-based payments company said virtual accounts accounted for 75 percent of all transactions processed through its application programming interface (API) platform in 2025, far ahead of card payments.
The shift reflects changing preferences among both businesses and their customers as digital commerce scales in Africa’s most populous economy.
Nomba processed N122 billion ($77 million) across 1.85 million transactions during the year, its first full year operating an API-led payments business. It served 829 active API merchants, with transaction volumes growing 46-fold between January and December.
The final quarter alone, it said, accounted for N105 billion, a 31-fold jump from the first quarter, the company said.
“What we’re seeing is a shift driven by end customers,” Yinka Adewale, CEO at Nomba said. “Customers increasingly expect payments to be instant, reliable, and not dependent on whether a card works or a channel is available. Merchants are responding by standardising on payment rails that reduce failure and work consistently at scale.”
Read also: Virtual Accounts: The future of business payments in Nigeria
Unlike seasonal spikes often seen in Nigeria’s payments ecosystem, Nomba said the growth reflected deeper and more sustained usage by businesses that had already integrated its API into their operations. That consistency, Adewale said, came from a deliberate focus on infrastructure reliability rather than rapid customer acquisition.
“Payments infrastructure isn’t something you optimise for marketing numbers,” he said. “It’s something you optimise for trust. If businesses are going to build on you, the system has to work quietly and consistently, even as usage grows faster than expected.”
Performance data from the platform showed a 99.78 percent transaction success rate during the year, with 4,076 refunds out of 1.85 million transactions, roughly one refund for every 450 successful payments. December, typically the busiest month for Nigerian businesses as firms close their books, served as a stress test. The month included the platform’s highest transaction days, including December 31, without any reported system degradation.
Transaction activity peaked consistently around 7 p.m., a time when many businesses have already closed for the day. Nomba said the pattern highlights the growing importance of payment systems that function seamlessly without manual oversight, allowing transactions to clear overnight while teams are offline.
The data also underscores diverging payment behaviour across business segments. Retail payments below N10,000 made up 63 percent of transaction volumes, reflecting high-frequency everyday commerce. By contrast, enterprise transactions above N1 million accounted for 48 percent of total transaction value, pointing to fewer but significantly larger payments.
Both ends of the spectrum were handled through the same API infrastructure, without separate routing systems, the company said, a capability it argues has encouraged businesses to expand usage over time.
The findings follow Nomba’s Apple Pay integration announced late last year, part of a broader push toward a globally compatible payments infrastructure.
Together, the milestones signal a longer-term strategy to support fast-growing Nigerian businesses while preparing them to accept payments from international customers without overhauling their systems as they scale.