Failed transactions have become a familiar ordeal for nearly every Nigerian with a bank account. In Africa's most populous nation, where digital payments have become central to everyday commerce, a transfer is initiated, the screen freezes, a debit notification arrives, and the corresponding credit never appears. The bank's response is typically a request to "exercise patience." The funds may reappear days later—or they may not—triggering a frustrating reversal process.

The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has set a target of eliminating failed transactions entirely by 2028. However, a new anonymous survey of 40 Nigerian payment professionals, bank staff, merchants, journalists, and everyday users reveals a fragmented landscape in which each group identifies a different root cause for the same problem—and each group's reasoning is grounded in its own institutional history.

Bank Staff: User Error as the Default Explanation

When asked why transactions fail, bank operations staff point almost reflexively to user error: incorrect PINs, wrong account numbers, insufficient funds. All four bank employees who participated in the survey offered some version of this explanation.

This tendency has deep roots. As Nigerian banks developed consumer-facing digital channels, the industry's liability framework became tied to authentication. A customer who enters the correct PIN and one-time password (OTP) is treated as having authorized the transaction. Consequently, when issues arise downstream, operations teams tend to examine customer input first rather than infrastructure.

Notably, this instinct persists even among staff who recognize infrastructural shortcomings. One bank operations employee told the survey: "I think it's [zero failed transactions by 2028] achievable, but only if the rails get fixed first. The single biggest drag right now is basic user error that no amount of infrastructure spend will fix."

Yet when asked what specific changes were needed, the same employee selected "upgrade NIBSS" and "mandatory bank API standards"—the very fixes that fintech engineers have been demanding. This simultaneous impulse to blame the customer while acknowledging infrastructure deficiencies illustrates how deeply ingrained the customer-fault reflex is within bank operations culture.

Fintech Developers: An Overburdened Switch

Those outside bank operations teams point to an entirely different set of causes. NIBSS (Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System) was established in 1993 as a shared settlement infrastructure for a banking sector far smaller than today's. E-banking guidelines were established and eTranzact launched in 2003. NIBSS's instant transfer rail went live in July 2011, years before Nigeria's cashless policy—introduced in 2012 to reduce reliance on physical cash—and the subsequent fintech boom pushed transaction volumes well beyond what the original architecture was designed to handle.

Every fintech built on top of NIBSS since then has effectively been operating on infrastructure designed for a smaller economy. This is why developers tend to identify the settlement switch as the primary failure point. Twelve out of 13 fintech developers surveyed, along with six of seven consumers, named NIBSS overload or bank downtime as the leading cause of transaction failures—not user error.

This distrust is reinforced by concrete, recent incidents. In September 2024, a NIBSS software error credited ₦13.66 billion to 176 accounts across 19 banks and fintechs, with no corresponding debit recorded anywhere in the system. NIBSS is now pursuing legal action against those 176 beneficiaries to recover the funds.

"Banks need to stop treating payments as a legacy IT problem," one developer wrote in the survey. "Many still rely on ageing core banking systems that struggle during peak periods. They need active data centres, real-time monitoring, faster incident response, and planned infrastructure upgrades instead of emergency fixes."

Journalists and Users: Telecom Infrastructure

Journalists and everyday users arrived at a similar distrust, but from a different angle. Eight of nine journalists surveyed identified network and telecom downtime—not NIBSS or the banks—as the primary culprit. This aligns with over a decade of underinvestment in the GSM towers that USSD banking depends on—a channel that remains critical for millions of Nigerians who lack smartphones or affordable data—and a well-documented history of telecom outages that reporters cover more routinely than any other group in the payment chain.

"Shaky telecom connectivity killing transactions mid-flight," one journalist wrote, adding that resolving the issue "doesn't happen without sustained investment, not just a press release."

Regulators: A Split Verdict

Even regulators, who might be expected to defend the system they oversee, split their blame between bank downtime and NIBSS overload rather than attributing failures to customer behavior. This suggests that within the CBN itself, the institutional understanding of where failures originate points away from the end user.

A Fragmented Path to Zero

None of these groups is arbitrarily assigning blame. Bank staff inherited a liability framework centered on authentication. Developers inherited a settlement switch built for a smaller market and then witnessed it fail publicly and expensively. Journalists inherited a decade of telecom outages. Each perspective represents a reasonable interpretation based on each group's direct experience with the system.

This fragmentation is precisely why the CBN's 2028 target of zero failed transactions faces a fundamental challenge: it addresses a system with no universally agreed-upon point of failure. Upgrading the settlement switch may satisfy developers. But unless banks also change how they classify and handle declined transactions, and unless telecom reliability is addressed in tandem, the familiar cycle—the frozen screen, the delayed credit, the two-day wait for a reversal—may persist regardless of any infrastructure investment.