The Central Bank of Nigeria has instructed all financial institutions, payment acquirers and service providers to implement mandatory dual connectivity on every Point of Sale terminal within one month. Issued through a circular dated December 11, 2025, the directive expands an earlier September 2024 policy and targets the persistent single-channel limitations that have caused widespread PoS disruptions across the country.
Under the revised framework, acquirers, processors and Payment Terminal Service Providers must maintain active, real-time connections to both the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System and Unified Payment Services Limited. By compelling institutions to adopt two independent routing channels, the CBN intends to reduce reliance on a single aggregator and significantly stabilise the national e-payment infrastructure—especially during peak periods when PoS failures severely affect small businesses.
The apex bank also mandated that all routing systems include automatic failover capabilities, allowing transactions to immediately switch between the two aggregators whenever one pathway experiences an outage. This forced redundancy is expected to boost transaction completion rates and ease the operational challenges faced by MSMEs that depend heavily on dependable electronic payments for daily revenue.
To ensure full industry compliance, the circular requires regular redundancy and failover testing. Both aggregators will collaborate with licensed institutions to confirm the resilience of their systems and verify uninterrupted service delivery. These exercises will now be incorporated into the CBN’s wider supervisory responsibilities across the payments sector.
The regulator strengthened disclosure requirements as well. Aggregators must promptly alert financial institutions when disruptions occur and must submit detailed incident reports to the Payments System Supervision Department within twenty-four hours. Each submission must outline the root cause, user impact, and corrective measures taken. This heightened transparency aims to curb prolonged outages that frequently leave traders, retailers, and service providers unable to process payments.
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With a tight implementation timeline, all integrations, system adjustments, and performance tests are expected to be completed before mid-January 2026. The CBN noted that this deadline aligns with its broader mission to enhance the resilience of Nigeria’s digital payment framework.
This directive builds on a sequence of regulatory reforms introduced to streamline the PoS ecosystem. In August 2025, the bank required all PoS terminals to be geo-tagged within sixty days, with new devices to be tagged before activation. The same circular introduced ISO 20022 standards, geofencing capabilities, and a ten-metre operational radius for devices. Terminals that did not meet compliance checks—scheduled from October 20, 2025—were marked for deactivation.
The CBN also tightened controls around agent banking operations, imposing penalties starting from five million naira and additional daily fines for ongoing infractions. It subsequently extended the enforcement deadline for geo-location and exclusivity rules to April 1, 2026, allowing operators more time to align with the requirements.
Overall, the new dual-connectivity mandate reflects the CBN’s intensified push to eliminate the payment hurdles that small businesses face daily. By reinforcing redundancy, enforcing stricter reporting, and stabilising transaction pathways, the bank aims to rebuild public trust in electronic payments and support the growth of MSMEs that depend on reliable PoS services to sustain their operations.
