Cash is expensive in Nigeria. When undercover agents for the Central Bank of Nigeria tried to buy cash on the open market, they found sellers charging markups of 20 to 40 percent of face value, the bank governor, Olayemi Cardoso, said at a March event in Abuja. Since 2012, the Central Bank has promoted a series of policies to reduce the amount of cash in circulation and shift Nigerians to electronic payments, which are lower cost, more secure, and more traceable. The Central Bank releases limited cash to commercial banks, who in turn cannot match public demand. When the banks do have cash, middlemen often take it in bulk to sell onward at a higher price.

In exchange, the Central Bank also built an ever-more-capable digital infrastructure for electronic payments, boosting Nigeria’s financial technology industry, and the volume of electronic payments in Nigeria grew around 16 times from 2018 to 2024. “Once that foundation was there, the cashless economy has done well,” says electrical engineer Funke Opeke, an eminence in the Nigerian technology scene who founded and later sold a crucial telecommunications and data services company, MainOne.

On the one hand, that is a victory. On the other hand, only those with reliable access to the Internet (about half of Nigeria’s population) can count on electronic payments. The rest still need cash.