CBN's POS Policy Overhaul Strains Nigeria's Last-Mile Financial Inclusion Network
Analysis finds that the Central Bank of Nigeria's 2026 POS policy overhaul is straining the last-mile agent infrastructure that underpins financial inclusion across the country, with direct implications for fintech operators and investors active in the sector.
Nigeria's POS Rules: the backup terminal was the whole point
The CBN's ban on running multiple POS terminals isn't a minor tidying-up exercise. For millions of roadside agents, keeping an OPay machine beside a Moniepoint one wasn't a loophole — it was how they stayed open when one network went down.
Force a one-agent, one-bank rule and you don't just tidy the market. You shift every network outage from a minor inconvenience the agent could route around, to a full stop on their income for the day.
The CBN's fraud and concentration concerns are real — ₦18.78 trillion moving through street kiosks in a single quarter is not a trivial blind spot. But the instrument it reached for punishes the agent who had nothing to do with the fraud, and relies entirely on each principal's own infrastructure being reliable. In Nigeria, that is a very large assumption.
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- How CBN’s 2026 POS policy overhaul is straining financial inclusion in Nigeria · technext24.com · T2