This article is part of Follow the Money, TechCabal's weekly series that unpacks the earnings, business, and scaling strategies of African fintechs, financial institutions, companies, and governments.

Segun Agbaje, the group chief executive officer of Guaranty Trust Holding Company Plc (GTCO), one of Nigeria's largest financial services groups, told analysts in 2020 that the group was coming for the payments space. Six years later, GTCO's numbers show that payments have become a business in their own right—one that makes money, brings in customers, and serves merchants.

Through Habari Pay Ltd, GTCO's payments business, the group has built a payments infrastructure operation spanning switching and processing. Switching and processing are the plumbing of digital payments—the layer that routes transactions between banks, merchants, and payment channels, earning small fees each time money moves. Through GTWorld and Pay-with-Transfer, it is processing increasingly large volumes of customer transactions.

On the surface, GTCO's first-half 2026 results were not particularly impressive. Gross earnings increased by 3.25%, profit after tax declined by 7.76%, and the cost-to-income ratio remained low at 31.50%.

Underneath those headline figures, however, is a bank pushing more of its customers' financial activity online and increasingly sitting between customers, merchants, banks, and payment rails.

When fintechs entered the market, they won customers by making payments faster and more reliable while building large merchant networks around point-of-sale (PoS) terminals. That helped reshape Nigeria's payments landscape, with the country processing more than ₦1.2 quadrillion ($902.19 billion) worth of transactions in 2025, according to the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN). GTCO's H1 2026 numbers show that banks are now investing heavily in the same infrastructure and customer behaviour.

Here are five numbers that show where GTCO's payments strategy is heading—and how the bank is moving closer to the transaction.

1. ₦7.81 billion ($5.87 million): Payments is a profit engine

HabariPay, GTCO's payments business, remains small relative to its banking franchise, but it is growing much faster and is the most profitable bank-led fintech in the country.

In H1 2026, HabariPay generated ₦7.81 billion ($5.87 million) in profit after tax, almost double the ₦4.02 billion ($3.02 million) recorded in H1 2025. Its operating income increased 87.16% year-on-year to ₦9.44 billion ($7.09 million), while the payment value processed through its switching and processing business rose 136.5%.

HabariPay launched in June 2022 to target SMEs and retailers, offering PoS, USSD, web gateways, virtual accounts, and switching services through Squad. In H1 2026, it reported growth across switching, airtime vending, and international payments for Habari.

"Strong transaction growth across switching, airtime vending and international payments reflects deepening ecosystem adoption, broader customer use cases and increasing cross-border activity," GTCO said.

Habari's switching and processing value has grown by 662.04% to ₦74.72 trillion ($56.17 billion) since H1 2024. By comparison, Access Holdings' Hydrogen reported a transaction value of ₦60.4 trillion ($45.41 billion) as of the nine months ending September 2025.

The trajectory points to a payments infrastructure business in the making: HabariPay is extracting high returns on its assets while scaling transaction volumes exponentially. In 2025, Habari told TechCabal that its switching and processing licence allows it to power point-of-sale terminals, a new line of business.

Airtime vending—the sale of mobile airtime through digital payment channels—is up 88.69%. That growth coincides with the temporary suspension of telecom companies from offering airtime and data credit advances in H1, a disruption that hit telco-led fintech businesses. MTN Nigeria's fintech revenue, for example, fell by 72.4% during the period.

International payments rose by 3,890.67% over the same period. They have benefited from the stabilisation of the foreign exchange market, which has allowed banks to raise limits on international transactions. The bank raised its quarterly international transaction limits from $6,000 to $20,000 in H1 2026, and in August increased the quarterly international payments limit to $40,000—a move that should translate into higher volumes by year-end.

GTCO's payments business spans multiple transaction channels, generating revenue from merchant payments, switching, transfers, airtime, international payments, and other services. The group earns small fees on the transactions it processes, with revenue accumulating as payment volumes grow.

"Revenue growth was supported by rising transaction activity, broader merchant and consumer adoption and expanding value-added services, while scalable infrastructure and disciplined execution continued to support strong PBT growth," GTCO said.

HabariPay's cost-to-income ratio stood at 17.3%, while return on average assets and equity rose to 75.3% and 78.2%, respectively, from 44.8% and 49.6% in H1 2024.

GTCO never really built HabariPay as another branded consumer fintech competing for downloads. Instead, it focused on making the unit a payments infrastructure business attached to a large banking group.

2. ₦26.70 trillion ($20.07 billion): GTWorld is becoming more than a banking app

GTWorld, GTCO's personal banking app, crossed three million active users in October 2025 and is growing at a month-on-month rate of 12%. In H1 2026, it processed 337.4 million transactions, up 15.82% year-on-year, while transaction value increased by 22.1%. E-business income, which captures revenue from the group's digital banking channels, grew by 47.36% during the period.

GTWorld is becoming more than a banking app. GTCO is turning its primary mobile application into a group-wide distribution layer across banking, pensions, and investments. Its growth gives the group a widening digital distribution channel through which it can move more banking services online while increasing the volume of it processes—making GTWorld an important bridge between GTCO's banking business and its broader payments ambitions.

GTCO noted that it is elevating GTWorld into a fully fledged financial services app with "the go-live of Account Opening and Linking, Subscription, and Redemption for GTFunds Managers. This milestone made Banking, Pensions, and Investments seamlessly accessible within a single integrated App."

Customers can now access banking, pensions, and investments through the same digital interface. The group's holding-company structure is what makes a single interface possible: banking, payments, pensions, and investments all sit within GTCO, so one app can reach every business line. Rather than building separate digital journeys for each business inside the group, GTCO is using one customer interface to distribute banking, payments, and investment products.

The app is therefore becoming less a digital version of a bank branch and more of a distribution layer across the group.

3. ₦1.11 trillion ($834.52 million): Pay-with-Transfer is changing how GTCO's customers pay

GTCO's Pay-with-Transfer feature recorded one of the fastest rates of growth in its payments business. Between H1 2025 and H1 2026, transaction value increased from ₦70.05 billion ($52.67 million) to ₦1.11 trillion ($834.52 million), while volume rose by 1,587.39%.

"Pay-with-Transfer values continued to increase, reflecting strong user adoption driven by speed and convenience, positioning it among the fastest-growing payment methods," the bank said.

The growth is happening as some older payment channels decline. Card usage dropped by 13.31%, while USSD transactions—a channel that lets customers pay from basic phones without internet access—declined by 15.29%. GTCO's payment rails are being rewritten: as instant transfers become the default way to move money, traditional channels like cards and USSD are seeing volume declines.

"Card payments remain important, although customer activity is increasingly shifting towards alternatives such as Pay-with-Transfer," the bank said.

Cards have historically been one of the most visible pieces of Nigeria's digital payments infrastructure, but instant transfers are increasingly reliable for everyday transactions. In 2025, Moniepoint said transfers accounted for 39% of payments for the informal businesses it surveyed, compared with 51% for cash and 9% for cards.

For GTCO, Pay-with-Transfer growth means it is capturing more of its customers' payment journey through its own channels.

4. ₦1.50 trillion ($1.13 billion): GTCO is serious about its PoS business

At the end of 2025, GTCO committed to deploying 200,000 PoS terminals nationwide and increasing the value of transactions processed through its terminals tenfold in 2026. The H1 numbers show it is making significant progress.

PoS transaction volume increased 299% year-on-year to 50.3 million transactions in H1 2026, while transaction value rose 369% to ₦1.50 trillion ($1.13 billion).

"Increased merchant adoption and higher transaction activity drove strong growth in POS volumes," GTCO said.

The lender did not disclose how many terminals it has deployed, but the growth in transaction volume and value points to an expanding merchant network. Its 2026 PoS plan targets ₦1 trillion ($751.82 million) in monthly total payment value by deepening its reach among SMEs, corporates, fintech platforms, and institutions through embedded finance products and closer integration with the GTCO ecosystem.

At its current H1 average of roughly ₦250 billion ($187.96 million) per month, the business is processing about a quarter of that target—a measure of both the scale of GTCO's ambition and the growth still required to reach it.

PoS terminals are one of Nigeria's most important financial distribution channels, serving millions of small businesses. PoS transactions amounted to ₦59.3 trillion ($44.58 billion) in Q1 2026. As of March 2025, there were more than 5.90 million active PoS terminals in Nigeria, with fintechs still holding a significant position in the market. Moniepoint says it has more than one million active terminals processing over ₦10 trillion ($7.52 billion) in transactions every month, while OPay says more than one million businesses depend on its merchant services.

Nigeria's banks are now pursuing this payment channel more aggressively. GTCO has removed processing fees on all its PoS terminals, making merchant acquisition a strategic priority rather than simply a source of transaction revenue. That mirrors the strategy fintechs used to build their merchant networks, and it puts GTCO in direct competition for the same small businesses that Moniepoint and OPay count among their merchant base.

5. ₦31.09 billion ($23.37 million): Technology spending is slowing

After years of increasing technology investment, GTCO's technology-related expenses declined by 17.66% year-on-year in H1 2026. It is the lender's lowest half-year technology-related expense since H1 2023, when it spent ₦17.02 billion ($12.79 million).

Between H1 2021 and H1 2025, GTCO's technology spending increased more than fivefold. In 2024 alone, technology spending increased by 48.4% to ₦88 billion ($66.16 million). The H1 2026 decline could signal a shift in its tech investments: GTCO is done building, and is now extracting value.

Technology and service-related expenses fell to exactly ₦31,096,407,000 in H1 2026. That marks GTCO's lowest half-year tech expense since 2023, signaling that the core payment rails are built and the bank is now capturing revenue at scale.

After years of building digital infrastructure, GTCO may now be moving from expanding its technology stack to extracting more value from the infrastructure it has already built, with the numbers suggesting that the infrastructure is being used at greater scale.

The gap is beginning to narrow

When Agbaje outlined GTCO's payments ambitions in 2020, he pointed to Paystack as a company operating in the space the group wanted to enter. In 2024, Paystack said businesses sent and received more than ₦1 trillion ($751.82 million) through its platform in July alone. Updated figures are not available, but that year the payments company said 66% of transactions on its platform were happening through bank transfers.

GTCO's payment platform is still some distance from the scale of Nigeria's biggest fintechs. OPay processed $358 billion in gross transaction value in 202 and recorded $72.47 million in net profit. Moniepoint processed ₦412 trillion ($309.75 billion) in transaction value.

How far the PoS business climbs toward its ₦1 trillion ($751.82 million) monthly target, and how much volume the raised international transaction limits add in the second half, are among the numbers to watch when the group's full-year 2026 results arrive.

But the numbers suggest that Agbaje's 2020 payments ambition is no longer just a strategy on paper. GTCO is increasingly building a payments business around its banking franchise's infrastructure, customers, and transaction flows—and the gap between that ambition and its current business is beginning to narrow.

Note: exchange rate used: ₦1,330.11/$.