The POS Business

Background

For most of Nigeria's banking history, getting cash meant finding a branch or a working ATM, both scarce outside major cities. The Central Bank of Nigeria introduced agent banking as the policy workaround, allowing licensed shopkeepers to take deposits and pay out cash through handheld devices. First Bank built an early stronghold with its Firstmonie network, but fintechs soon took over by flooding the market with low-cost POS terminals. OPay flooded streets in green, PalmPay in violet, and Moniepoint, founded by Tosin Eniolorunda and Felix Ike as TeamApt, ended up processing much of the country's daily cash flow.

The boom

The policy delivered immediate results. Between 2018 and 2021, POS agents became a standard fixture of Nigerian streets. Operators earned steady income from transaction fees, while neighborhoods without a single bank branch gained multiple cash points. Data from the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System tracked registered terminals growing from a few hundred thousand to millions by 2023. Capital followed the surge. OPay reached a reported two-billion-dollar valuation on the back of its agent wallet business, and Moniepoint later reached a billion-dollar valuation of its own. For a brief period, international policy reports regularly cited Nigeria as a textbook case of financial inclusion.

The saturation

Then Nigeria did what Nigeria does. The barrier to entry was a single terminal, a plastic table, and an umbrella, while mass unemployment supplied the workforce. POS stands multiplied until they faced each other across the same street, shared the same shopfronts, and stood umbrella-to-umbrella in rows of four and five. Density reached a point where operators were paying fees to cash out their own earnings at the terminal next door. Margins thinned, forcing operators to compete on pricing in both directions, undercutting rivals to secure foot traffic and surcharging whenever local ATMs broke down, which was most of the time.

The cash scarcity finale

The naira redesign crisis of early 2023 was the moment the industry inverted its original purpose. The Central Bank of Nigeria, under Governor Godwin Emefiele, recalled the 200, 500, and 1,000 naira notes before printing sufficient replacements. Banknotes vanished, and ATM queues spilled onto primary roads. POS agents became the country's primary cash supply, and transaction fees skyrocketed. Withdrawing cash routinely cost between 10 and 20 percent of the principal, priced according to local desperation. A service introduced to improve financial inclusion spent months operating as a private tax on legal tender. Subsequent regulator attempts to mandate Corporate Affairs Commission registration for operators yielded predictable compliance rates.

Names and numbers to hold onto

A few reference points anchor the record. Firstmonie represents the early bank-led deployment phase, while OPay, PalmPay, and Moniepoint mark the fintech wave that saturated the market with terminals. Growth metrics rely on NIBSS terminal registration data, tracking the expansion from a few hundred thousand devices to millions. The cash shortage of early 2023 serves as the critical stress test, demonstrating how a network designed for financial access could fail functionally while turning a massive profit. All underlying figures reflect data published by the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System and the Central Bank of Nigeria.

Where it stands

The POS business survives, which is more than can be said for most entries in this directory. It remains functional out of sheer necessity, particularly outside major urban centers where traditional bank branches never arrived. But high-margin growth has ended. The regulator is still writing new rules for it, too: the CBN replaced its founding 2013 guidelines with a consolidated framework in October 2025, more than a decade after the industry it was built for stopped resembling the one on paper. What remains is a saturated, low-margin trade where everyone operates and almost no one prospers—the standard equilibrium for local commerce.