Payment rails
NIP (NIBSS Instant Payment)
Nigeria’s instant transfer rail, running continuously, connecting commercial banks and electronic money institutions.
NIP is operated by the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System. It runs seven days a week and settles in minutes. Digital banks and electronic money operators are connected with their own institution codes and behave like banks from the rail’s point of view.
Two real limits. Ceilings applied by the receiving institution, often low on lightly verified electronic money accounts, cause rejections that are silent on the sending side. And the interbank network has periods of degradation: the median timing is measured in minutes, the 95th percentile in tens of minutes.