By Oluwagbeminiyi Ariyo-Agbaje
The most challenging reality in the fintech industry today in Nigeria is the crude manuality that governs the operations of all stakeholders throughout the payment ecosystem. Things like cross-referencing of transaction records and waiting for daily reports should not be obstacles we should be dealing with in 2026. And these pertains to everybody from switches to fintechs. I think its quite a pathetic thing to deal with for an industry processing hundreds of thousands of transactions daily.
What this problem exposes is that there is a technical sophistication gap between transaction processes and settlement process. The purpose of this article is to bring awareness to this problem.
To be fair, the Nigerian payment ecosystem boasts of astute advancements in its transaction segment. Valuable innovations like instant payments, and USSD channels have been delivering maximum value to consumers for he past 10 years. For example, the NIBSS reported processing over 4 billion transactions in 2023 alone.
However, the settlement layer is a completely different ball game. Its a manual circus show. Payment aggregators that handle 40-50 banks have no standard operating procedure to tell their banking partners in real time, what they have earned on each transaction. Of course, the data exits just not nimble enough to travel to everyone who needs it when they do. The risks they cause are outlined as follows.
The first one is that accounting reconciliation delays cause liquidity risk. And the risk they create. When a bank cannot confirm in real time what it has earned in commissions until the end of the week, it affects its ability to manage its liquidity. And in Nigeria where the volumes are high, even a day’s worth of delay can spiral into massive scale inefficiency.
The second challenge is that the audit liabilities caused by these delays. Due to the CBN’s increased regulatory scrutiny, prompt financial records have become more important. So players who still rely on spreadsheet-based settlements run the risk of getting flagged by the CBN.
The third risk is the hidden cost of growth. Whenever a new player is onboarded into the industry, their addition puts a further burden on the speed at which the aggregator can scale its partner network without proportionally increasing its own operations cost. And because everyone would rather cut cost as the reward otherwise isn’t particularly enticing, the efficiency of the overall settlement system suffers for it.
Part of what makes this difficult to solve is that it requires thinking across two domains simultaneously: transaction infrastructure and financial reporting infrastructure. Most fintech engineering teams are heavily optimised for the former. Transaction throughput, latency, uptime, and processor redundancy attract significant attention. Settlement and reporting systems, by contrast, are often treated as operational concerns rather than engineering priorities.
The result is that many platforms build payment infrastructure of genuine technical sophistication and then pipe its outputs into reporting tools that cannot keep pace. A real-time payment engine feeding a next-day spreadsheet is not a coherent system. The value created at the transaction layer gets partially consumed by the inefficiency at the settlement layer.
What is actually required is what might be called a commission-aware aggregation architecture. This means the system that processes transactions must also understand, at the point of processing, what the financial obligations of that transaction are. Which biller triggered it? Which partner is owed a fee? At what rate, under what commercial arrangement? This logic cannot live downstream in a reporting tool. It needs to be embedded in the aggregation pipeline itself.
When that architecture is in place, the downstream effects are significant. Partners stop waiting for settlement reports and start querying live dashboards. Finance teams stop reconciling and start auditing. Disputes stop being investigations and start being queries against a shared record. The system generates what regulators increasingly require: an auditable, timestamped, transaction-level record of every financial obligation created and settled.
The implications span beyond single fintech products to the entire payment eosystem. As open banking frameworks develop across West Africa and as the CBN continues to push for greater interoperability across payment service providers, the quality of settlement infrastructure will increasingly determine which players can participate in multi-party ecosystems.
Partnerships between fintech aggregators and commercial banks, for example, are fundamentally constrained by trust and transparency. A bank that cannot independently verify its commission earnings from a third-party aggregator relationship is a bank with limited appetite to deepen that relationship. Automated, real-time settlement reporting transforms that dynamic. It converts a dependency on the aggregator’s goodwill into a verifiable, empirical record.
For regulators, the benefits are equally clear. Real-time settlement data at the transaction level is the raw material for effective oversight. It enables pattern detection, dispute resolution, and financial monitoring at a granular level that ordinary periodic reporting simply cannot provide. As the CBN and other regulators across the continent move toward data-driven supervision, platforms with mature settlement architectures will be structurally better positioned to meet those requirements.
There is currently no industry-wide standard for the discussed real-time settlement reporting in Nigeria’s payment aggregation space. Platforms implement it differently, inconsistently, or not at all. That fragmentation is itself a drag on ecosystem development. When every aggregator presents its settlement data in a different format, using different timing conventions and different commission attribution logic, the partners downstream face a different reconciliation challenge on each platform they work with.
The sector has an opportunity to define a shared expectation: that any licensed aggregator operating at meaningful transaction volumes should be capable of providing partners with real-time, per-transaction settlement data in a standardised auditable format. This is not a technically ambitious standard. The components exist. The challenge is prioritisation and architectural intent.
Platforms that build this capability into their core infrastructure rather than retrofitting it into reporting tools will carry a meaningful operational advantage as the market consolidates around the most trusted and most interoperable players.
To conclude, the fintech infrastructure story in Africa is often told through the lens of access and adoption. Both matter enormously. But the durability of that progress depends on what is built underneath it. Settlement infrastructure is not a visible feature to end users. It is, however, the foundation on which institutional trust in the payments ecosystem is built. Getting that layer right is not a future priority. For platforms operating at scale, it is an immediate one
