The Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS) has announced that its newly introduced National Payment Stack (NPS) has processed 26.55 million transactions valued at N1.4 trillion across 48 participating financial institutions.
The NPS, a sovereign and ISO 20022-compliant digital payment infrastructure, is being rolled out to succeed the 15-year-old NIBSS Instant Payment (NIP) system as Nigeria moves to modernise its financial ecosystem.
According to NIBSS, FirstBank currently leads the participating institutions in transaction volume, while Fidelity Bank ranks highest in total transaction value.
Other major financial institutions contributing to the early growth of the platform include Guaranty Trust Bank, Sterling Bank, Access Bank and Moniepoint. NIBSS said the NPS is designed to bring payments, identity and data onto a unified digital infrastructure, creating a more intelligent and interoperable payment system while supporting multi-currency transactions and enhanced cross-border capabilities.
The platform is built around the ISO 20022 data architecture, which allows financial institutions to process structured and metadata-rich transactions. According to NIBSS, the architecture will support automated corporate reconciliation, improve merchant collections and enable request-to-pay invoicing.
