The Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS) has adopted technology from Transactility to develop its National Payment Stack (NPS), a next-generation instant payments platform aimed at strengthening Nigeria’s digital payment infrastructure.
The platform leverages Transactility’s jPOS-based technology, including the jPTS switch, to support ISO 20022, an international messaging standard that enables the exchange of richer and more structured financial transaction data.
According to the organisations, NIBSS developed the platform using a modular architecture that combines local engineering capabilities with open-source and enterprise technologies to meet the demands of Nigeria’s financial ecosystem.
The adoption builds on NIBSS’s longstanding use of jPOS technology for transaction processing under the ISO 8583 messaging standard.
For the new platform, the organisation incorporated jPTS and its ISO 20022 capabilities to develop a payment switch tailored to the scale and operational requirements of the Nigerian market.
A key feature of the National Payment Stack is its reliance on source-accessible technology, which allows NIBSS to customise and expand the platform as market needs and regulatory requirements evolve.
Access to the underlying source code also gives the organisation greater control over the platform’s development and reduces dependence on proprietary vendors’ software release schedules.
NIBSS Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Premier Oiwoh, said the platform was designed to meet the scale and demands of Nigeria’s payments market.
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“The NPS was designed and built for the scale and demands of the Nigerian payments market. The jPOS ecosystem gives us the flexibility to continue developing the platform as the ecosystem evolves,” Oiwoh said.
The platform is designed to support several payment services, including instant account-to-account transfers, QR-code merchant payments, alias-based transactions using identifiers such as phone numbers, and bulk payments.
Its adoption of ISO 20022 is also expected to support improved interoperability among financial institutions and provide opportunities for developing additional digital payment services.
Transactility Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Alejandro Revilla, described the deployment as an important milestone for both organisations and the wider payments industry.
He noted that the project demonstrated how open technology could be combined with local engineering expertise to build national payment infrastructure at scale.
Established in 1993, NIBSS is owned by the Central Bank of Nigeria and licensed deposit money banks. It operates critical financial infrastructure supporting interbank clearing and settlement, point-of-sale payments, and identity verification services through the Bank Verification Number system.
Transactility, headquartered in Boca Raton, Florida, is the commercial steward of jPOS, an open-source framework used to develop payment gateways and switches supporting ISO 8583 and ISO 20022. The company says the technology has been deployed across payment systems in more than 120 countries.
The development of the National Payment Stack marks another step in Nigeria’s digital payments evolution, as NIBSS seeks to strengthen transaction processing, improve payment interoperability, and provide a flexible foundation for future financial services.
