One of the more consequential shifts in Nigeria’s financial services industry is the change in customer sentiment.
Four years ago, while the CBN carried out a naira redesign policy, many industry watchers highlighted how fintechs like OPay and Moniepoint had gone mainstream.
Moniepoint, for example, was no longer just known for its blue POS terminals; traders now received payments through them. Similarly, OPay, which had been around but never really mainstream, became the top choice for Nigeria’s informal sector to receive payments.
Yet, there was always the feeling that these fintechs were only great for receiving payments and would struggle to convince users to also maintain long-term account balances with them.
In a conversation with this reporter, one trader expressed these sentiments, admitting that while fintechs allowed him to receive payments, he was still hesitant to leave huge sums of money over a long period in those accounts.
In essence, fintechs became pipes through which transactions were routed while commercial banks became reservoirs holding the bulk of customers’ funds.
All that is changing, albeit gradually. Quick transfers remain a draw for users, but fintechs are increasingly becoming more than pipes.
This month, FairMoney announced that it now has 30 million users, a number that firmly places it as a major financial services player in the country.
Some of Nigeria’s biggest banks, including First Bank and Access Bank, have 43.5 million and 43 million customer accounts, respectively. But while it is some way off displacing these banks, it has reached that milestone in significantly less time — First Bank was founded in 1894 and Access Bank in 1989.
FairMoney isn’t the only Nigerian digital bank to see its customer base grow rapidly. OPay says it serves 46 million users in Nigeria, while PalmPay reaches 40 million users.
Other digital banks in the country are either close to the 10 million customer mark or have exceeded it. Moniepoint says it has over 20 million business and individual customers, while Kuda has over 7 million customers.
The upstarts of yesterday are now major institutions in their own right.
Why deposits are key for the future
Financial institutions in the banking industry make money from a variety of ways: interest from loans and credit cards, interchange fees, business banking fees, treasury services, and a host of other means.
But for most commercial banks in Nigeria, interest on loans is a major income earner. That makes customer deposits more valuable than just customer numbers. A bank or fintech with large deposits can do a lot more for less than one with large customer numbers but thin deposits.
Banks know it; fintechs know it; and that understanding is changing how fintechs operate.
This year, Flutterwave and Paystack have disclosed that they now hold microfinance bank licenses. Flutterwave is also looking to secure banking licenses in East Africa. The goal is to turn the businesses that they have helped to process payments into banking customers.
On the consumer side, FairMoney has gone to great lengths to show that its customer deposits are growing rapidly. As it moves beyond being a digital lender, it says 56% of its loan book in 2024 was covered by customer deposits.
That suggests that its customers are no longer content logging in occasionally to request loans; they are now receiving their salaries, paying bills, and making payments from these accounts.
Having large customer deposits is crucial for a financial institution because it gives them more room to play with.
Any fintech that has to lend today typically sources capital from high-net-worth individuals or other financial institutions. Banks don’t have to do any of these, and so fintechs are forced to compete on the speed of issuing loans rather than competitive interest rates.
The large deposits held by banks is the one time where having the first-mover advantage has been valuable. While many Nigerians are young and under 30 — ideally an advantage for fintechs — the segment of the population with steady or large incomes is over 30 and has used these banks for much of their adult lives.
That’s a tough relationship to break up with just speedy transfers and a better user interface. It also doesn’t help that many people can live with what is often a less pleasant service experience.
But that does not mean banks will always have the customer’s deposits, or at least the bulk of it. Fintechs now understand the value of having customer deposits and are set on attracting more of it.
The next battle is for the customer’s money
The growth of customer deposits changes the economics of a fintech business.
For years, the easiest way to measure the success of a fintech was by looking at how many people used it or how much money passed through its platform. Both are useful metrics, but neither tells the full story.
A fintech can have tens of millions of customers and still have relatively little money sitting in their accounts.
If those customers receive money on OPay or Moniepoint and immediately transfer it to a traditional bank, the fintech has won the transaction but lost the relationship that comes with holding the customer’s money.
That is why the next phase of competition will be about getting customers to stay. The products being built around savings, salary accounts, business banking, lending, investments and interest-bearing balances are not simply attempts to give customers more financial services. They are ways to make fintech accounts more useful as primary accounts.
For banks, this creates a different kind of threat. A fintech does not necessarily need to convince a customer to close their GTBank, FirstBank, or Access Bank account. It only needs to convince them to move a growing portion of their money elsewhere.
And once enough money starts moving, the distinction between a fintech account and a bank account becomes less important to the customer.
The fintechs have already proved that Nigerians are willing to trust them with their everyday transactions. The harder test is whether they are willing to trust them with their savings, salaries, and larger balances.
If they succeed, customer numbers will no longer be the most interesting measure of how far Nigeria’s fintech revolution has come.
Last updated: September 10, 2026
