Fintech engineers and industry professionals are speaking out. They say Nigerian banks carry the heaviest blame for failed transactions. This problem frustrates millions of digital payment users every day. Their view comes from recent industry surveys and public commentary. It points to one main culprit: outdated core banking infrastructure. That infrastructure, not the fintech apps people use daily, is the real bottleneck.
This complaint is not new. However, it has grown louder. Digital transaction volumes in Nigeria keep climbing. The Central Bank of Nigeria ran its own sector survey. The survey found that payment innovation has outpaced supervisory and infrastructural capacity. Engineers say this gap sits at the door of legacy bank systems. It does not sit with the fintech platforms customers see and use.
So what actually goes wrong? Engineers point to something called a network handshake failure. Here is how it works. A customer starts a transfer or card payment. The request moves from the fintech platform through a switch. It then reaches the receiving bank’s core system. That system must confirm the transaction back along the same chain. But during busy periods, this confirmation step often breaks down. One side registers a debit. The other side registers nothing. The customer is left with a receipt and a lower balance, but no completed transaction.
Industry voices insist this failure point lives inside bank infrastructure. It is not a fintech app problem. Many commercial banks still run core banking systems built for a smaller era. These systems were never designed for today’s transaction volumes. Nigeria processed close to eleven billion electronic transactions in 2024 alone. Older banking cores struggle under that weight. Breakdowns spike especially on weekends and around month end, when transfer activity surges.
At a recent fintech industry summit, Ajibade Laolu-Adewale added his voice to the debate. He chairs the Committee of E-Business Industry Heads. He warned that failed transactions and slow reversals damage more than one company’s reputation. Customers end up blaming the whole payment ecosystem instead. So he called for enforceable service agreements across banks, fintechs, telcos, and switching platforms. He also pushed for faster, AI driven dispute resolution to end the long customer wait.
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That wait remains a sore point. Customers who face a failed transaction often must file physical dispute forms. Then they wait weeks for a resolution. Regulatory guidelines call for a much faster automatic reversal. Yet fintech engineers say banks often lack the automated reconciliation tools needed for instant verification. As a result, staff must step in manually, and that can take days.
The CBN has taken one step to help. It now directs all payment processors and acquirers to keep redundant connections. These connections link to the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System and alternative settlement networks. So if one pathway fails, a backup exists. Engineers welcome this move. But they note it only fixes routing. It does not fix the accountability gap. Customers still get stuck between their bank, their fintech provider, and the switch. Meanwhile, each side points fingers at the others when money goes missing.
For now, ordinary Nigerians carry the cost of a dispute they did not create. Banks must modernise the core systems processing the bulk of daily transactions. Until that happens, fintech engineers warn that failed transactions will keep resurfacing. This will happen no matter how advanced the apps built on top of that infrastructure become.
