At the same time, digital finance has become more layered and interconnected: transactions, identity verification, and service delivery increasingly depend on shared infrastructure, multiple providers, and digital interfaces operating together. This shift reflects a structural change in how financial systems now operate. In an earlier era, a consumer’s confidence was anchored in a specific institution – a bank, a branch, a relationship they could identify and hold accountable. In platform-led systems, a single transaction may traverse multiple institutions, infrastructure providers, and algorithmic processes. No single actor controls the full chain. When something goes wrong – a failed transaction, an unresolved dispute, a fraudulent charge – accountability is diffuse, recourse is unclear, and the consumer has no obvious counterpart to turn to. Reliability, accountability, and user confidence now depend on how well systems coordinate: how failures are resolved, how risks are shared, and how oversight adapts to interactions that cut across institutional boundaries. Where this architecture is incomplete or misaligned, trust can erode even when access expands and transaction volumes grow. This challenge manifests most acutely in three areas: how operational failures are handled when they occur, how artificial intelligence is governed as it is deployed at scale, and whether institutions can build the coordination required to address shared threats collectively.
These developments have introduced a new policy question. It is no longer only whether financial systems can bring people in, but whether they can retain their confidence once they are there.
Nigeria is an important case through which to examine this transition, not because it is typical, but because it has moved further and faster than most. A decade of deliberate policy, shared infrastructure investment, and private innovation transformed what was once a predominantly bank-led system into one of the most active digital financial ecosystems in the world, earning AfricaNenda’s ‘mature inclusivity’ rating. The introduction of the Bank Verification Number in 2014 created a shared identity anchor. The NIBSS Instant Payment platform made real-time settlement possible at scale. The licensing of fintechs, payment service banks, and mobile money operators brought millions into formal financial activity. These were deliberate, coordinated achievements.
Figure 1 | Formal Account Ownership: Global Average and Nigeria, 2011–2024
Source: World Bank, Global Findex Database 2025 (data to 2024). Indicator: Account ownership at a financial institution or with a mobile-money-service provider (% of population ages 15+), FX.OWN.TOTL.ZS. Retrieved 2 June 2026. Nigeria figures are Findex estimates and differ from EFInA’s Access to Financial Services survey, which uses a different methodology.
Nigeria’s experience also shows that infrastructure expansion does not by itself produce lasting confidence. As the system has grown, the pressures have become more visible: dispute resolution remains uneven; accountability is often unclear across multi-party transactions; fraud losses remain significant even as case volumes have declined; and coordination across institutions has not developed at the same pace as the infrastructure on which they depend. These are the structural pressures of a system that has advanced rapidly (consequences of scale), and they pose a second-order question: not whether the system works, but whether people will trust it enough to let go of cash.
A system in which user confidence remains weak will not be used to its potential. Adoption may rise while reliance remains shallow. Product innovation may continue while the conditions for durable participation remain underdeveloped. These pressures carry implications beyond the financial sector. Confidence gaps in financial infrastructure affect productivity, investment behaviour, and the velocity of economic activity – not only the financial sector but the broader economy that depends on it. The next phase of financial inclusion depends not only on the availability of services, but on the institutional conditions that sustain participation over time; a shift from asking whether consumers have accounts to asking whether they trust the systems those accounts depend on, and whether that trust is sufficient to make digital finance their default rather than their fallback.
In February 2026, Bridgforte convened a closed-door Executive Table in Lagos, bringing together thirty senior decision-makers from across Nigeria’s financial ecosystem, including banks, fintechs, payment infrastructure providers, regulators, and development finance institutions. The discussion was structured around three interconnected dimensions of the confidence challenge: operational failure and recourse; the governance of artificial intelligence in financial services, where supervisory frameworks are not keeping pace with deployment and new categories of risk and accountability gap are emerging; and the coordination barriers that prevent institutions from responding collectively to shared threats. This report draws on that discussion, together with structured polling, post-event survey evidence, and supporting research. It applies the Bridgforte Trust Architecture Framework – a five-pillar analytical model developed to examine the system-level conditions under which digital financial systems can command and retain public confidence – to interpret and synthesise those findings. While grounded in Nigeria’s experience, the analytical framework is designed to be applicable across frontier and emerging market financial systems facing analogous structural challenges.
Related in this report