Nigeria’s rapid expansion of digital payments is facing a growing trust deficit, with transaction failures, poor dispute resolution and weak accountability emerging as bigger threats to confidence than fraud, cybersecurity and artificial intelligence, a new report has found.

The finding comes as Nigeria’s digital financial ecosystem processes more than N1.07 quadrillion in electronic payment transactions annually, underscoring the scale at which consumers, businesses and financial institutions now depend on digital channels to move money.

However, the report, “Trust Architecture in Platform-Led Finance: Structural Governance Imperatives for Nigeria’s Digital Financial Ecosystem,” by Bridgforte, warned that the growth in transaction volumes has not been matched by a corresponding strengthening of public confidence in the systems supporting them.

The assessment, based on insights from senior executives across banks, fintechs, payment infrastructure providers, regulators and development finance institutions, gave Nigeria’s digital financial ecosystem an average trust resilience score of 5.4 out of 10.

The report said the score should not be viewed as a neutral assessment, but as a warning from senior stakeholders with close knowledge of the performance and credibility of the country’s financial system.

“A middling score might appear inconclusive. It is not. These are the chief executives, board directors, and senior institutional leaders closest to the system’s performance and most invested in its credibility,” the report stated.

According to the report, Nigeria’s financial sector has largely overcome the technical challenge of moving money digitally but now faces the more fundamental task of convincing consumers to trust the systems facilitating those transactions.

“The…