Verve, Nigeria's largest card scheme, plans to let customers pay by tapping their phones and, eventually, to allow AI assistants to make payments on their behalf, chief executive Vincent Ogbunude said on Thursday.

Speaking on the Big Tech and Enterprise Stage at Moonshot by TechCabal, TechCabal's annual technology conference, on 29 October, Ogbunude described the plans as the next step in removing friction from payments. "The greatest cost in payments is friction," he said. Every extra step, from typing an account number to retrying a failed transfer, adds cost, he argued.

The plans build on a push Verve began last year. TechCabal reported in December that Verve had passed 100 million cards and was moving into contactless payments and tokenisation, which replaces card details with a one-time code. Tokenisation is what lets a phone store a card's credentials securely and stand in for it at a contactless terminal, the basis for tap-to-pay. Verve now has 130 million cards, Ogbunude said.

Tap-to-pay on phones would let customers pay with a device they already carry, without a physical card. Agentic payments go further: an AI assistant, acting on a customer's instructions, would find and complete a purchase without the customer handling each step. Global card networks are moving in the same direction, building programmes that give cardholders controls over what their AI agents are authorised to spend. Visa and Mastercard both announced programmes in 2025 to let AI agents make payments for cardholders.

Verve is the card scheme of Interswitch, the Nigerian payments company. Ogbunude framed Interswitch's history as a run of fixes for friction: before its network, customers had to visit their own bank's branch to withdraw cash; Interswitch let them use cards at any bank's ATM, and later built Quickteller, POS terminals and Verve.

The volumes involved are large. The NIBSS Instant Payment system, the interbank system that routes transfers between Nigerian banks, processed about 11.2 billion transactions worth ₦1.07 quadrillion in 2024, the latest full-year figure from the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System.

If Verve delivers, the measure of progress in Nigerian payments shifts from how many people hold a card to how few steps it takes to pay. For a market where most payments now happen by transfer, the bigger question is whether customers and banks will trust software to spend money on their behalf.