Nigeria’s national instant payments rail runs on open source switching software, and the operator holds the roadmap, not a vendor. Transactility announced on 13 October that the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System used its jPOS technology to roll out the National Payment Stack.
NIBSS designed and developed the stack itself, an ISO 20022 platform for instant payments. It’s modular, combining capabilities NIBSS built in house with selected open and enterprise technologies. At the core sits Transactility’s jPTS switch, built on jPOS, the open source payment processing framework Transactility looks after commercially. NIBSS has run jPOS for years, mostly for ISO 8583 transactions, and used jPTS’s newly added ISO 20022 support to build a switch for the Nigerian market.
Full access to the source code changes the balance of power. NIBSS keeps control of the architecture, the product roadmap and operational development, plus the intellectual property it has created. It can also extend the platform and respond to market or regulatory changes without waiting on a proprietary vendor’s release cycle.
The stack handles instant account to account transfers, QR code payments at merchants, payments sent to aliases such as a phone number, and bulk payments.
“The NPS was designed and built for the scale and demands of the Nigerian payments market,” said Premier Oiwoh, Managing Director and CEO of NIBSS. “The jPOS ecosystem gives us the flexibility to continue developing the platform as the ecosystem evolves.”
The latest figures NIBSS has published date from August, when the stack had recorded 26.55 million transactions worth ₦1.4 trillion across 48 participating institutions. NIBSS is aiming for a full industry cutover so it can decommission the 15 year old NIBSS Instant Payment rail.
For Transactility, the deployment “shows how open technology and local engineering can be used to build national payment infrastructure at scale,” said Founder and CTO Alejandro Revilla.
NIBSS was incorporated in 1993 and is owned by the Central Bank of Nigeria and the country’s licensed deposit money banks. Transactility, based in Boca Raton, Florida, is the commercial steward of jPOS.
Digital Trade Outlook’s View: Nigeria Bought Control, Not Software
Most central payment operators rent their future from a vendor. NIBSS kept the code, the roadmap and the intellectual property, so Nigeria decides how its national rail evolves and who builds on it. This is a sovereignty decision dressed as a technology one. The real prize is ISO 20022 data, which powers fraud detection today and cross border links tomorrow, and NIBSS now controls it end to end. The risk is all theirs too. If the cutover from a 15 year old rail stumbles, there is no vendor to blame. If it lands, every central infrastructure in Africa has a template worth copying.
Related on Digital Trade Outlook
- Absa Selects Thunes as Strategic Multicurrency Clearing Partner Across Africa
- TIS warns corporates are underprepared for ISO 20022 as November deadline nears
- African Banks Expand as Global Lenders Retreat from Trade Finance