Payment companies that control more than 25% of either card issuing or merchant acquiring will be limited to 15% of the other market. They have until December 31 to comply, but one big question remains: how exactly will the CBN calculate market share?
Nigeria’s biggest payment companies have spent years trying to own more of the transaction journey.
Get the customer. Give them an account or card. Put a POS terminal in the hands of the merchant. Process the payment when the two meet.
A new Central Bank of Nigeria rule could make it harder for any one institution to dominate both ends at the same time.
Under a circular issued on June 15, the CBN says any licensed financial institution with more than 25% of the card-issuing market cannot hold more than 15% of the merchant-acquiring market during the same period.
The same restriction works in reverse.
An institution controlling more than 25% of merchant acquiring cannot simultaneously control more than 15% of card issuing.
Affected companies have until December 31, 2026 to comply.
What exactly is the CBN trying to separate?
The rule sounds more complicated than it is.
Card issuing sits largely on the customer side of payments: financial institutions provide consumers with cards and other payment instruments they can use to make transactions.
Merchant acquiring sits on the business side: financial institutions and payment companies provide the infrastructure that allows shops and other businesses to accept those payments.
Nigeria’s fintech boom has increasingly blurred that distinction.
Companies that started by serving merchants have expanded into consumer banking. Others that built huge consumer wallets have moved aggressively into POS terminals and merchant payments.
That has created companies with millions of users and enormous influence across different parts of the same payment transaction.
The CBN says its new rules are intended to address growing market concentration and the systemic risks that can emerge when a small number of companies become deeply embedded across several layers of the payments system.
Moniepoint and OPay are obvious companies to watch
The CBN circular does not name individual companies.
But Moniepoint and OPay are difficult to ignore because of their scale.
Moniepoint says its terminals powered eight out of every ten in-person payments in Nigeria in 2025.
The company says it processed ₦412 trillion across more than 14 billion transactions during the year.
Independent POS market tracker POSmarketCap currently estimates Moniepoint at about 38.5% of Nigeria’s POS transaction value, with OPay at around 27%.
Those numbers help illustrate how concentrated Nigeria’s agent and POS market has become.
They do not, however, automatically mean that either company exceeds the CBN’s new thresholds.
That is because the regulator’s restrictions apply specifically to card issuing and merchant acquiring, and one important question remains unanswered.
How will the CBN calculate market share?
A company could look dominant under one measurement and much smaller under another.
Market share could theoretically be measured by:
- transaction value
- transaction volume
- number of active cards
- number of customers
- number of merchants
- or some combination of these
The June circular establishes the 25% and 15% thresholds but does not provide a detailed methodology for calculating those shares.
That means the eventual measurement method could determine which companies actually need to restructure.
For a company with a huge merchant network but a smaller share of transaction value, for example, the outcome could look very different depending on the metric the CBN chooses.
The regulator has also instructed institutions to submit monthly market-share returns, giving it more visibility into how concentrated each segment of the payments system has become.
This is not the only way CBN is tightening the POS market
The market-share restrictions arrive alongside a broader regulatory push around agent banking and digital payments.
Under separate agent-banking rules, POS agents are limited to ₦1.2 million in cumulative cash-out transactions per day, while individual customers face separate transaction limits.
New exclusivity provisions that took effect in April 2026 also restrict how agents can operate across different principals.
Together, those changes point to a CBN that is becoming increasingly uncomfortable with loosely structured agent networks and payment companies becoming dominant across several parts of the financial system at once.
Another ring-fencing proposal could go even further
Four days before issuing the market-share circular, the CBN also released draft guidelines on the ring-fencing of closely linked financial entities.
Those proposals are aimed at preventing related companies operating under different licences from mixing activities, capital, governance and risk in ways that make regulatory oversight difficult.
The CBN said one of the concerns is regulatory arbitrage created when activities under different licence categories become too closely intertwined.
But those ring-fencing guidelines were issued as an exposure draft, meaning they should not yet be treated as final rules unless the regulator formally adopts them.
December is the immediate deadline
For now, the binding market-share requirement gives affected payment companies until December 31, 2026 to bring themselves within the new limits.
What that actually requires from companies such as Moniepoint, OPay and other large payment operators will depend heavily on how the CBN defines and measures each market.
Some companies may need to reduce their presence in one segment. Others could restructure how parts of their operations are organised.
And some may discover that, under the CBN’s eventual methodology, they are already within the limits.
What is clear is the direction of travel.
Nigeria’s payments market rewarded companies for years for getting as big as possible across as many parts of the transaction chain as they could.
The CBN is now signalling that scale on one side may come with limits on how dominant the same company can become on the other.
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