Dateline: NIBSS and Transactility, infrastructure partnership, 13 October 2026

The Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS), the country’s central payment infrastructure operator, used Transactility’s open-source jPOS technology to roll out the National Payment Stack (NPS), an ISO 20022 instant payments platform that NIBSS designed and developed, Transactility said on 13 October 2026 in its release. The release, Fintechbits notes, gives no go-live date, transaction volume, cost or migration timetable for the National Payment Stack, so it does not say whether every Nigerian bank is already on NPS or whether it is still being phased in. What it does make clear is that NIBSS, not a vendor, holds the source code.

What the National Payment Stack does

NPS supports account-to-account instant transfers, QR merchant payments, alias-based addressing such as phone numbers, and bulk payments, according to the release. NIBSS designed it with a modular architecture that combines its own software with selected open and enterprise components. The release describes the National Payment Stack as a foundation for new services as the market develops, which suggests NIBSS sees it as a platform for products beyond plain transfers rather than a straight replacement of one switch for another.

Phone-number addressing is the feature most likely to change how ordinary users pay. Paying someone by a mobile number instead of a ten-digit account number lowers the friction for small person-to-person and merchant payments, where typing a long account number is the step most likely to go wrong.

The switch at the centre is Transactility’s jPTS, built on jPOS, an open-source framework that has been used for more than 25 years to build payment gateways and switches. NIBSS had already used jPOS for many years for ISO 8583 card transaction processing. For the National Payment Stack it moved to jPTS with the newly added ISO 20022 support, a richer messaging format than ISO 8583.

NIBSS is owned by the Central Bank of Nigeria and all licensed deposit money banks in the country, and it also runs the Bank Verification Number system used for customer identification, according to the release.

Fintechbits analysis

Why NIBSS kept the code

The release is unusually specific about control. It says NIBSS retains control of the NPS architecture, product roadmap and operational development, as well as the intellectual property it developed for the platform, and can extend NPS “without relying on a proprietary vendor’s release cycle.”

Premier Oiwoh, managing director and chief executive of NIBSS, said that “the NPS was designed and built for the scale and demands of the Nigerian payments market.” Alejandro Revilla, founder and chief technology officer of Transactility, said NPS “shows how open technology and local engineering can be used to build national payment infrastructure at scale.”

Fintechbits analysis

Why the open-source choice is the right call for NIBSS

The route NIBSS passed on is the familiar one: license a vendor platform and accept the vendor’s upgrade schedule. NIBSS chose to own the stack and pay for engineering instead. For an operator at the centre of Africa’s largest economy, where payment volumes and fraud patterns change quickly, that is a sensible trade. It lets NIBSS add features, such as new fraud controls, on its own timetable.

Fraud is where that freedom will be tested first. Faster payments move fraud faster too, a point Fintechbits made in its analysis of what rules-based systems miss in instant payments. An operator that controls its own code can respond to new scam patterns without waiting for a vendor release, but it also carries the full cost of building and testing those changes.

The weaker part is what the National Payment Stack announcement leaves out. Without a live date, a list of participating banks or any volume figures, outside observers cannot tell how much of Nigeria’s instant payment traffic runs on NPS. Fintechbits has written about what global fintech gets wrong about emerging markets, and assuming new infrastructure reaches every bank at once is an easy version of that mistake. Our read is that the architecture is sound and the disclosure is thin.

Frequently asked questions

What is Nigeria’s National Payment Stack?

The National Payment Stack is an ISO 20022 instant payments platform designed and developed by NIBSS. It supports account-to-account transfers, QR merchant payments, phone-number addressing and bulk payments.

What role does Transactility play in the National Payment Stack?

Transactility supplied its open-source jPTS switch, built on the jPOS framework, as the foundation for NPS. NIBSS retains control of the architecture, roadmap and the intellectual property it built on top.

What does the NIBSS announcement leave out?

The release, Fintechbits notes, gives no go-live date, transaction volume, cost or migration timetable for the National Payment Stack. Those figures would show how much of Nigeria’s instant payment traffic has moved onto NPS.

What to Watch Next

The clearest signal will come from NIBSS itself. If NIBSS publishes National Payment Stack transaction figures or a list of participating banks, it will show whether NPS has replaced older switching for instant transfers or is running alongside it.

Why this matters

The release, Fintechbits notes, gives no go-live date, volume, cost or migration timetable for the National Payment Stack, which NIBSS built on Transactility’s open-source jPOS software and announced on 13 October 2026. NPS handles instant transfers, QR payments, phone-number addressing and bulk payments under ISO 20022. NIBSS keeps the code and the roadmap, which lets it respond faster to fraud and market change. The release does not say how much of Nigeria’s payment traffic NPS carries.

Primary sources

businesswire.com | PRESS RELEASE | https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20261013889455/en/NIBSS-and-Transactility-Partnership-Delivers-National-Payment-Stack

nibss-plc.com.ng | COMPANY WEBSITE | https://www.nibss-plc.com.ng

jpos.org | COMPANY WEBSITE | https://www.jpos.org