PalmPay Nigeria Managing Director Chika Nwosu has delivered a pointed call to Nigeria’s digital finance ecosystem to move beyond user acquisition and focus on building the infrastructure, trust, and embedded financial tools that allow small businesses and ordinary Nigerians to participate meaningfully in the digital economy.
Speaking at both the Digital PayExpo 2026 on 17–18 June and the third edition of the Payments Forum Nigeria earlier in 2026, Nwosu argued that financial inclusion at scale can only be sustained when the systems behind it are reliable, integrated, and accessible enough to serve everyday life.
Read also: PalmPay launches new debit card in Nigeria in partnership with Verve, targets 35m users
Infrastructure before innovation
Nwosu’s central argument is deceptively simple: financial inclusion must be built on infrastructure. Nigeria’s fintech sector has made significant progress in onboarding millions of users into the digital financial system, but the next phase of growth will be determined not by how many accounts are opened but by whether transactions succeed consistently, whether fraud is contained, and whether the systems underlying daily payments can handle the volume that a financially included economy generates.
PalmPay has prioritised this internally, achieving a transaction success rate of 99.95 per cent — a benchmark Nwosu cited at the Payments Forum Nigeria as an important foundation for adoption and confidence. He noted that inconsistent transactions are themselves a driver of financial exclusion: users who experience repeated failures revert to cash, and the inclusion gains are lost.
Getting 35 million users is a distribution achievement. Keeping them transacting daily requires a different kind of discipline — one measured in uptime, success rates, and fraud outcomes rather than download numbers.
Read also: Africa Finance Corporation surpasses US$1bn revenue for the first time
Embedded finance as the path for SMEs
On the question of small businesses, Nwosu was direct. Financial services must meet people where they are — in markets, on ride-hailing platforms, at POS terminals, and in online shops. The model that works is not one where SMEs seek out financial products but one where financial products are embedded into the tools and environments through which businesses already operate.
He outlined three priorities for unlocking this potential: reliability at scale, deep ecosystem integration, and accessibility. The benchmark he set was equally direct: success will be achieved when a trader in a remote market can transact with the same speed and confidence as a corporate executive in Lagos. Until that gap closes, the inclusion story remains incomplete.
PalmPay has expanded its agent network to over 500,000 across Nigeria, processing up to 15 million daily transactions. The network functions as a bridge between cash-based activity and digital systems, enabling deposits, withdrawals, and onboarding in communities where smartphone-only models fail.
Read also: Peter Obi urges African countries to invest in human capital amid global trade uncertainty
What it means for the sector
The Digital PayExpo and Payments Forum conversations reflect a broader maturation in how Nigeria’s fintech industry is thinking about its role. The phase of rapid user acquisition is giving way to a phase of consolidation, trust-building, and infrastructure deepening — and the institutions best positioned to lead that phase are those that built for reliability rather than growth alone.
For Nigerian SMEs, the difference between a payments infrastructure that works 95 per cent of the time and one that works 99.95 per cent of the time is not five per cent — it is the difference between a tool they can run their business on and one they keep as a backup.
