The Central Bank of Nigeria has directed all financial institutions, acquirers and payment service providers to implement mandatory dual connectivity for every Point of Sale transaction within one month. The instruction, issued through a new circular dated December 11, 2025, upgrades an earlier policy introduced in September 2024 and is designed to eliminate the long-standing single-channel bottlenecks responsible for recurring PoS downtime across the country.
Under the new rule, acquirers, processors and Payment Terminal Service Providers must maintain active connections with both the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System and Unified Payment Services Limited. By compelling the industry to rely on two independent transaction pathways, the apex bank aims to reduce dependence on any single aggregator and stabilise the national payment infrastructure, especially during peak periods when PoS failures often cripple small businesses.
The CBN also announced that all routing systems must automatically switch between both aggregators whenever a disruption occurs. This automatic failover is now a compulsory industry standard and is expected to significantly improve transaction completion rates during network outages, a persistent challenge for MSMEs that depend heavily on electronic payments for daily sales.
To reinforce the policy, the circular mandates periodic redundancy and failover tests. Both aggregators will work directly with regulated financial institutions to validate the readiness of their infrastructures and ensure uninterrupted service delivery. These tests will form part of the CBN’s oversight of the broader payment ecosystem.
The regulator also introduced stricter reporting obligations. Payment aggregators must immediately notify banks when downtime occurs and must submit detailed incident reports to the Payments System Supervision Department within twenty-four hours. Each report must explain the source of the failure, its impact on users and the corrective steps taken. This level of transparency is expected to reduce the kind of prolonged outages that often leave market traders, retailers and service providers unable to process transactions.
With the one-month implementation window, all integration work, system adjustments and testing are expected to be completed before the middle of January 2026. The CBN emphasised that this deadline is part of a broader effort to build a more resilient digital payment ecosystem.
This directive follows a series of recent regulatory actions aimed at sanitising the PoS industry. In August 2025, the central bank issued a circular requiring all existing PoS terminals to be geo-tagged within sixty days, with new devices expected to be geo-tagged before activation. That earlier document introduced ISO 20022 messaging standards, required geolocation and geofencing capabilities and restricted operational radius to about ten metres from registered business addresses. Devices that failed compliance checks scheduled from October 20, 2025 were slated for deactivation.
The bank also imposed stricter rules on agent banking, mandating geo-tagging and introducing penalties starting at five million naira with additional daily fines for continued violations. It later extended the deadline for enforcing location and exclusivity rules until April 1, 2026 to give operators more time to comply.
Overall, the new dual-connectivity directive signals an intensified push to remove the payment frustrations that small businesses encounter daily. By stabilising transaction channels and enforcing stronger reporting and redundancy standards, the CBN aims to strengthen public confidence in electronic payments and support the growth of MSMEs that rely on fast and reliable PoS services to keep their businesses running.
