Verve, Nigeria’s largest card scheme, plans to let clients pay by tapping their telephones and, ultimately, to let AI assistants make payments on their behalf, its chief government, Vincent Ogbunude, mentioned on Thursday.
Speaking on the Big Tech and Enterprise Stage at Moonshot by TechCabal on 29 October, Ogbunude described the plans as the following step in eradicating friction from payments. “The greatest cost in payments is friction,” he mentioned. Every additional step, from typing an account quantity to retrying a failed switch, provides value, he argued.
The plans construct on a push Verve started final 12 months. TechCabal reported in December that Verve had handed 100 million playing cards and was transferring into contactless payments and tokenisation, which replaces card particulars with a one-time code. Verve now has 130 million playing cards, Ogbunude mentioned.
Tap-to-pay on telephones would let clients pay with a tool they already carry, with no bodily card. Agentic payments go additional: an AI assistant, appearing on a buyer’s directions, would discover and full a purchase order with out the client dealing with every step.
Global card networks are transferring the identical approach. Visa and Mastercard each introduced programmes in 2025 to let AI brokers make payments for cardholders.
Verve is the cardboard scheme of Interswitch, the Nigerian payments firm. Ogbunude framed Interswitch’s historical past as a run of fixes for friction: earlier than it, clients needed to go to their very own financial institution’s department to withdraw money; its community allow them to use playing cards at any financial institution’s ATM, and it later constructed Quickteller, POS terminals and Verve.
The volumes concerned are massive. The NIBSS Instant Payment system processed about 11.2 billion transactions price ₦1.07 quadrillion in 2024, the newest full-year determine from the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System.
If Verve delivers, the measure of progress in Nigerian payments shifts from how many individuals maintain a card to how few steps it takes to pay. For a market the place most payments now occur by switch, the larger query is whether or not clients and banks will belief software program to spend cash for them.
