Interswitch Group Partners with 5 Leading Nigerian Banks to drive Mass Adoption in Industry’s Most Ambitious Drive to Make ‘Tap-to-Pay’ the New Default for Digital Payments.

Interswitch Group and five (5) Leading Nigerian Banks, namely GTBank, Wema Bank, ProvidusUnity Bank, Zenith Bank and FirstBank are at the forefront of driving an unprecedented effort geared towards bringing tokenized (tap-to-pay) transactions across Google Pay, Apple Pay and Bank Mobile Apps to the generality of merchants and customers in Nigeria.

Tokenization, which is more popularly described as ‘tap-to-pay’ replaces sensitive payment details, such as a card number, with a substitute code, or token, for use in a transaction. By limiting the exposure of actual card data, tokenization can help strengthen payment security while enabling smoother digital payment experiences.

In an announcement at a media briefing in Lagos last Friday, Interswitch, through its technology and long-standing expertise across multi-channel digital payments in Africa, will leverage the pivotal role it plays as a digital payments network orchestrator to support financial services providers, merchants and consumers realize the benefits of tokenization, including:

• Higher authorization rates:

  Helping improve payment approvals and enabling banks to capture more revenue opportunities.

• Reduced fraud risk:

  Limiting the exposure of sensitive payment data and helping reduce fraud liability.

• Greater customer confidence:

  Supporting secure, seamless digital payment experiences that encourage customers to transact with confidence.

“Collaboration across the payments ecosystem is essential to expanding secure and accessible digital-payment options in Nigeria. Our work at Interswitch sits at the heart of this next frontier in digital payments and supports the entire financial services ecosystem and helps create the infrastructure required for more consumers to embrace tokenized payments with confidence,” said Akeem Lawal, Managing Director, Payment Switching & Processing at Interswitch.

As Lawal explained: “For everyday users, the benefit is straightforward: their actual card or payment details need not travel across the payment network each time they pay. Instead, a substitute code, a unique digital representation is used; one designed for a particular merchant, device or transaction. If someone steals it, they’ve stolen nothing. It doesn’t work anywhere else. It can’t be reverse-engineered into your real card details.” Lawal further asserted that “As Interswitch, working with our bank partners, we are helping to establish the issuer connectivity, tokenization and payment processing capabilities required to bring ‘tap-to-pay’ and wallet-based payments to Nigerian consumers and we are excited to progressively consolidate our partnerships with our ecosystem partners to make secure, seamless and innovative payment experiences more accessible across Africa.”

Speaking during the media briefing, he further opined that “As Interswitch, we have always believed that everyone in this ecosystem has a role to play, not just in advancing innovation, but in making it accessible, relatable, and valuable to the people it's meant to serve. Tokenization cannot be an Interswitch story alone, by any means. It is an industry story - and it is exactly why we are all here today. That is what network orchestration truly means for us as Interswitch. For us, being at the center of the digital payments ecosystem is not about owning every node. It is about connecting every node and making the whole network more valuable than the sum of its parts”