Interswitch Group Leads Nigeria’s Tokenization Charge, Mobilizing Issuers, Schemes & Merchants to Make Tap-to-Pay the New Default for Digital Payments

…Plays lead role in facilitating technology and infrastructure enablement to issuers, card schemes & major merchants to drive mass adoption of seamless tap-to-pay transactions in Nigeria

Interswitch Group, a leading African integrated payments and digital commerce company, is at the forefront of pioneering tokenization infrastructure and enablement, supporting multiple banks, financial institutions and card schemes as they bring tokenized payments to merchants and customers in Nigeria and across key African markets, including Kenya and Uganda.

Tokenization, which is more popularly described as ‘tap-to-pay’ replaces sensitive payment details, such as a card number, with a substitute code, or token, for use in a transaction. By limiting the exposure of actual card data, tokenization can help strengthen payment security while enabling smoother digital payment experiences.

Through its technology and long-standing expertise across multi-channel digital payments in Africa, Interswitch leverages the pivotal role it plays as a digital payments network orchestrator to help financial services providers realize the benefits of tokenization, including:

• Higher authorization rates: Helping improve payment approvals and enabling banks to capture more revenue opportunities.
• Reduced fraud risk: Limiting the exposure of sensitive payment data and helping reduce fraud liability.
• Greater customer confidence: Supporting secure, seamless digital payment experiences that encourage customers to transact with confidence.

“Collaboration across the payments ecosystem is essential to expanding secure and accessible digital-payment options in Nigeria. Our work at Interswitch sits at the heart of this next frontier in digital payments and supports the entire financial services ecosystem and helps create the infrastructure required for more consumers to embrace tokenized payments with confidence,” said Akeem Lawal, Managing Director, Pavment Switchino & Processing at Interswitch

As Lawal explained: “For everyday users, the benefit is straightforward: their actual card or payment details need not travel across the payment network each time they pay.

Instead, a substitute code, a unique digital representation is used; one designed for a particular merchant, device or transaction. If someone steals it, they’ve stolen nothing.

It doesn’t work anywhere else. It can’t be reverse-engineered into your real card details.

Lawal further asserted that “As Interswitch, we are helping to establish the issuer connectivity, tokenization and payment processing capabilities required to bring ‘tap-to-pay’ and wallet-based payments to Nigerian consumers and we are excited to progressively consolidate our partnerships with our ecosystem partners to make secure, seamless and innovative payment experiences more accessible across Africa.”

Also commenting on the central role played by Interswitch in enabling this next frontier of payment innovation become widely accepted by merchants and consumers, Cherry Eromosele, EVP for Marketing & Communications asserted that “Interswitch’s extensive work implementing tokenization across the digital payments ecosystem in Nigeria reflects our broader commitment to building the trusted, reliable infrastructure that helps digital payments work for people and businesses across the continent. For more than two decades, we have focused on delivering steady, lasting impact, helping make life simpler, faster and more secure for businesses, consumers and government across Africa.

Rather than focus only on product features, at, we recognize the people whose everyday moments are made possible by the infrastructure behind their payments. That’s why we say we are powering moments that matter. “