The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has issued a sweeping directive requiring all Point-of-Sale (PoS) operators to establish dual live connectivity with both licensed aggregators — the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS) and Unified Payment Services Limited (UPSL) — within one month.

The directive aims to strengthen resilience in Nigeria’s fast-growing digital payments ecosystem and eliminate the risks associated with routing transactions through a single aggregator.

The circular, signed by Dr. Rakiya Yusuf, Director of Payments System Supervision, mandates that acquirers, processors, Payment Terminal Service Aggregators (PTSAs), and Payment Terminal Service Providers (PTSPs) must maintain active connections to both NIBSS and UPSL. Systems are required to switch automatically if one aggregator experiences downtime, ensuring seamless failover and uninterrupted transaction processing.

Additional requirements include periodic joint testing with banks to validate redundancy, as well as real-time notifications to financial institutions and the CBN within 24 hours of any disruption. The compliance window begins immediately, giving operators until mid-January 2026 to implement the changes.

The directive builds on lessons from September 2024, when widespread outages exposed vulnerabilities in Nigeria’s payments infrastructure due to reliance on single aggregators. That incident disrupted millions of transactions and highlighted the fragility of the cashless economy.

Industry stakeholders have welcomed the new rules as a long-overdue step toward robust digital payments. With PoS transactions now exceeding N10 trillion monthly, resilience has become critical to consumer confidence and business continuity. Analysts say the dual connectivity mandate will not only reduce systemic risk but also reassure merchants and customers who have grown wary of frequent transaction failures.

The policy underscores the CBN’s broader push to modernise Nigeria’s financial infrastructure and support the country’s cashless agenda. By enforcing redundancy at the aggregator level, regulators hope to ensure that Nigeria’s digital payments backbone can withstand shocks, scale with demand, and deliver reliability comparable to global standards.