How agent banking went from financial lifeline to four rival umbrellas on one street.
Published 20 June 2026 · Last updated 14 July 2026
Agent banking was one of the smartest things to happen to Nigerian finance. It put cash within reach of people banks had ignored for decades. Then the entire country decided it was the business to be in, and the lifeline became a landscape.
The POS Business
A row of POS stands, each with its own umbrella and its own opinion on fees.
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Contents
For most of Nigeria's banking history, getting cash meant finding a branch or a working ATM, and both were scarce outside the big cities. The Central Bank of Nigeria pushed agent banking as the fix: ordinary people, licensed as agents, could take deposits and pay out cash through point-of-sale terminals. First Bank built its Firstmonie agent network into one of the largest on the continent, and then the fintechs arrived and turned terminal distribution into an art form. OPay flooded the streets in green, PalmPay in violet, and Moniepoint, founded by Tosin Eniolorunda and Felix Ike as TeamApt, quietly became the rails behind an enormous share of the country's daily cash movement.
It worked, and it worked beautifully. Between roughly 2018 and 2021 the POS agent became a fixture of Nigerian life. Agents earned real income from fees. Communities without a single bank branch suddenly had five cash points. Registered terminals climbed from a few hundred thousand to millions in a handful of years, with NIBSS counting terminal registrations in the millions by 2023. Investors noticed: OPay reached a reported two billion dollar valuation on the strength of its agent and wallet business, and Moniepoint would go on to join the unicorn club. For a while Nigeria was cited internationally as an agent banking success story, and it deserved the citation.
Then Nigeria did what Nigeria does. The barrier to entry was one terminal, a plastic table and an umbrella, and unemployment supplied the workforce. POS stands multiplied until they faced each other across the same street, then shared the same frontage, then stood umbrella to umbrella in rows of four and five. The joke wrote itself: soon POS operators would need other POS operators to withdraw their own earnings. Margins thinned, and operators started competing on fees in both directions, undercutting to win customers and surcharging wherever the nearest ATM was broken, which was usually.
The naira redesign crisis of early 2023 was the moment the business fully consumed its own purpose. The central bank, then led by Governor Godwin Emefiele, redesigned the 200, 500 and 1,000 naira notes and pulled the old ones before the new ones existed in meaningful quantity. Banknotes vanished. ATMs queued into the road. POS agents became the country's de facto cash supply, and fees went vertical: withdrawing your own money could cost ten to twenty percent of it, priced by the hour and by desperation. A service invented to bring banking closer to the poor spent several months functioning as a private toll gate on the naira. Regulators later pushed operators to register with the Corporate Affairs Commission, with the compliance rate you would expect.
The entry rests on a few anchors worth keeping straight. Firstmonie as the bank-led pioneer. OPay, PalmPay and Moniepoint as the fintech wave. NIBSS terminal registration data for the growth curve. The February and March 2023 cash crisis as the stress test the system failed in the most profitable way possible. Each figure in this entry carries a source note and should be confirmed against NIBSS and CBN publications before anything is treated as final.
The POS business survives, which is more than most entries on this site can say. It remains genuinely useful, especially outside the cities, and the terminals are not going anywhere. But the golden era is over. What is left is a saturated, low-margin trade that everyone is in and almost no one is excited about, which is the most Nigerian ending an industry can have.