Tap-to-pay struggles in Nigeria despite Chicken Republic deal and digital payment growth

CashAfrica partnered with Food Concepts on October 13 to roll out mobile tap-to-pay across Chicken Republic's 350+ outlets, aiming to boost contactless payment adoption in Nigeria. While Lagos' BRT system shows tap-to-pay can work—using Touch and Pay Technologies' Cowry card with 300,000+ active users processing over 56 million transactions—wider adoption faces hurdles. Nigerians already use digital payments extensively (POS transactions hit 1.38 billion worth ₦18.32 trillion in 2024), but they remain unconvinced about tap-to-pay specifically due to trust concerns in a low-trust market where removing PIN authentication raises safety fears, and the familiarity of transfer payments which surged during the 2023 cash shortage. Previous attempts like Unified Payments' PayAttitude (2015) and Access Bank's Tap to Phone with Visa (March 2025) solved supply-side issues but failed to create compelling reasons for consumers and merchants to switch behaviors at scale. The CBN's 2023 contactless rules set ₦15,000 no-verification limits and ₦50,000 daily cumulative caps, yet tap-to-pay still competes with entrenched alternatives. For adoption to grow, the technology must offer clear advantages over existing methods—such as leveraging Nigeria's 8.3 million registered POS terminals (NIBSS, March 2025) to integrate with current cashless infrastructure while addressing trust through robust execution beyond surface-level deployment, potentially normalizing biometric authentication as experimented with by Access Bank (2020) and Accelerex (2024). What specific incentive would make you choose tap-to-pay over your current preferred digital payment method?

SOURCE: https://techcabal.com/2026/10/16/hurdles-facing-contactless-payments/