The Banks Backing Nigeria’s Digital Economy, and the Ones Still Catching Up

Nigeria’s digital economy has not grown in isolation. Behind every fintech transaction, every API-powered payment, and every digital SME tool is a banking relationship that either enables or restricts what a business can do. As the country’s fintech sector crossed 430 registered companies by early 2025, a 70 percent increase from 255 in January 2024, the question of which banks are genuinely supporting digital businesses has become sharper and more consequential.

The answer, it turns out, is complicated.

Traditional Banks Are Investing, but Slowly

Nigeria’s tier-one banks spent a combined ?460 billion on IT infrastructure upgrades in 2024. Access Holdings led with N193.5 billion, followed by GTCO at N88 billion, Zenith at N67.3 billion, and UBA at N48 billion. These are not trivial figures. They represent a sector under genuine competitive pressure, forcing institutions built around physical branches to rebuild their core infrastructure from scratch.

GTBank’s switch from its legacy Basis platform to Infosys Finacle in October 2024 was among the most visible of these transitions. Zenith similarly migrated to Oracle Flexcube. Sterling Bank went a different route, commissioning a locally developed platform called SEABaaS. This move signals growing ambition among mid-tier institutions to own their own technology stack rather than pay perpetual licence fees to foreign vendors.

None of this happened quietly. Customers experienced service outages lasting days. But the disruption reflects something more substantive than routine maintenance: Nigerian banks are retooling their foundations to serve a market where digital-first businesses now set the pace.

The Banks That Built Their Own Fintech Arms

Some traditional institutions took a more direct approach: they built fintech subsidiaries and competed in the same market they serve.

Wema Bank’s ALAT, launched in 2017, was the first digital bank by a commercial institution in Nigeria. It remains the most integrated, contributing to Wema’s N14.1 billion in electronic banking income in 2024. GTCO launched HabariPay in 2021, which posted a profit after tax of N3.9 billion in 2024, a 79 percent jump from the prior year. FCMB’s Credit Direct recorded N7.9 billion in net profit for the same period, and grew its loan book to N88.3 billion, positioning it as a meaningful digital lending operation rather than just a subsidiary on paper.

Access Holdings’ fintech arm, Hydrogen, earned N3.03 billion after tax in the first nine months of 2024 alone. Stanbic IBTC’s Zest has struggled to reach profitability since its 2023 launch, recording a N2.1 billion net loss in 2024, a reminder that building a fintech subsidiary does not guarantee traction.

What these efforts show is that the most forward-looking commercial banks in Nigeria are not simply offering business accounts with internet portals. They are building products, acquiring customers, and competing directly in the digital payments space that fintechs have long called home.

Where Fintechs and Banks Intersect

For digital businesses, whether startups, freelancers, or SMEs, the banking relationship often begins with the settlement infrastructure behind a fintech product. Paystack, which processes over $250 million in monthly transaction volume, partners with Wema, Access, and Zenith Banks to facilitate virtual accounts and bank transfers. Bank transfers now account for 58 percent of Paystack’s transaction volume, up from 28 percent in 2022. That shift did not happen by fintech willpower alone. It required banks that were technically capable of handling the volume reliably.

Moniepoint, which hit unicorn status following a $110 million Series C in late 2024, serves over 10 million business and individual accounts and processes $17 billion monthly. Its network of 300,000 POS agents is embedded in the settlement infrastructure of the formal banking system. Interswitch, which reported 50 percent revenue growth reaching N137.5 billion in 2024, continues to serve as the backbone of interoperability, ensuring that a payment made on one platform can settle to an account at a different bank.

What Digital Businesses Actually Need From Banks

Beyond settlement, digital businesses in Nigeria face a more specific challenge: getting reliable, API-ready banking infrastructure that allows them to build products on top of it. This is where the gap between intent and execution has historically been widest.

Anchor, an embedded finance startup, crossed N1 trillion in processed transactions in 2024, serving over 400 businesses, many of them building financial products using Anchor’s API layer precisely because getting that access directly from a commercial bank remained impractical. The CBN’s December 2023 decision to lift its ban on banks serving crypto companies opened a significant corridor, and the SEC’s subsequent regulatory incubation program for virtual asset providers created a clearer framework for digital businesses operating in that space.

UBA generated N589 billion in fees and commissions in 2024 — a 91.8 percent increase driven in part by digital services across its African operations. Access Holdings’ equivalent figure rose 85.4 percent, attributed specifically to growth in digital banking services and credit-related income. These numbers suggest that the banks benefiting most from Nigeria’s digital economy are, in turn, investing the most in enabling it.

The Honest Assessment

Not every Nigerian bank deserves to be called a supporter of digital business. Many still impose onerous documentation requirements, inconsistent API access, and account restrictions that create friction for small digital operators. For a solo developer or a bootstrapped startup, the practical experience of opening a business account and integrating banking services can still be unnecessarily cumbersome.

But the direction of movement is clear. The combination of competitive pressure from fintechs like OPay, PalmPay, and Moniepoint, the CBN’s push for an 80 percent financial inclusion rate by 2026, and Nigeria’s fintech sector pulling in over $2 billion in investment in 2024 has created conditions that no major commercial bank can afford to ignore.

The banks most visibly supporting digital businesses today are those that have combined infrastructure investment with product development: Access Bank, GTCO through HabariPay, Wema through ALAT, and UBA through its pan-African digital push. The ones still catching up are racing against a market that will not wait.