UBA eyes small business market with massive pos terminal launch

United Bank for Africa (UBA) has launched 46,000 smart PoS terminals across Nigeria, a major play to reclaim market share from dominant fintechs like Moniepoint, OPay, and PalmPay. The terminals, branded under UBA’s new RedPay identity, mark the bank’s bold return to a high-stakes payments battlefield it once led.

In the early 2010s, traditional banks like UBA dominated Nigeria’s point-of-sale (PoS) ecosystem. But that changed dramatically as fintechs began capturing the informal retail space, offering lower fees, better reliability, and faster onboarding.

Today, fintech-led agency banking players control more than 70% of Nigeria’s PoS market, according to Stears Business. By contrast, legacy banks have been slow to scale, constrained by internal bureaucracy and ageing infrastructure.

UBA’s new rollout signals a calculated counteroffensive.

Unlike traditional terminals that only process card payments, RedPay is a full-service digital terminal designed to rival devices from Moniepoint, PalmPay, and even Flutterwave’s Send App. Redpay provides customers exciting features designed to boost efficiency, transparency, and trust for merchants; including instant settlement, real-time monitoring, pay-by-link functionality, and a 100% transaction success rate. 

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UBA claims that RedPay can settle transactions instantly or within 30 minutes, matching what fintechs have long promised their agents.

RedPay is also structured as an independent brand, a possible precursor to spinning it off as a separate payments company mirroring Access Bank’s strategy with Hydrogen Pay.

The bank is betting that its trust, regulatory status, and liquidity advantage will tip the balance, especially among merchants weary of failed transactions and frozen funds common in some fintech platforms.

UBA is not simply targeting interchange revenue. RedPay is designed as a gateway product to upsell merchants on microloans & working capital, inventory management tools, business accounts with analytics, embedded insurance.

This ecosystem strategy reflects a shift from transaction revenue to lifetime customer value (LCV) which is a playbook that has powered Moniepoint’s billion-dollar valuation.

Competitive Landscape: What UBA is up against

[Source: company press releases]

UBA’s ambition is clear, but execution remains the wild card. The main risks are agent liquidity, downtime & Service, merchant trust, and speed of deployment.

UBA’s RedPay launch isn’t just about reclaiming old territory. It reflects a broader trend of traditional banks trying to blend fintech agility with institutional trust. Whether that hybrid model can outpace nimble fintechs remains to be seen.

But one thing is clear in Africa’s $100+ billion informal economy: the war for merchant payments is just getting started.