Despite rapid growth in digital payment, Nigeria’s transaction landscape is still dominated by cash. Bank transfers, USSD, and card payments have gained traction, but contactless payments remain largely at the margins. CashAfrica is betting this could change.
Founded by Malik Asamu and Bello Opeyemi, the company believes tap-to-pay technology could eventually become as routine as bank transfers, reshaping how Nigerians pay for goods and services in physical retail environments.
CashAfrica is positioning itself not as a consumer-facing fintech rival, but as an infrastructure provider powering contactless payments for banks, fintechs, and payment service providers.
“From our experience, device availability is becoming less of a barrier than many people assume,” Asamu says. “The bigger challenge is user behaviour and awareness. Once users experience the speed and convenience of tap-to-pay, adoption tends to become much easier.”
What You Need to Know
The startup’s strategy is built around partnerships, which it sees as critical to scaling adoption in a market dominated by established financial institutions and entrenched consumer habits.
One of its earliest milestones came in 2025 through a pilot partnership with PalmPay, where CashAfrica enabled tap-to-pay functionality on 1,000 point-of-sale (POS) terminals.
Another key collaboration with ChamsSwitch focuses on switching and settlement for transactions processed through CashAfrica’s infrastructure. Beyond technical integration, the partnership is also designed to strengthen regulatory compliance and improve trust among financial institutions.
The startup has also attracted early backing, including undisclosed investments from venture capitalist Timothy Draper through the Draper University Founder Residency Programme in 2025, alongside funding from the Afropreneur Angel Group earlier this year.
Driving Adoption of Contactless Payments
Globally, contactless payments are gaining momentum due to their speed and convenience, often completing transactions in seconds with a simple tap of a card or smartphone.
In Nigeria, however, adoption has been slower despite the availability of NFC-enabled smartphones and contactless bank cards issued by some financial institutions.
CashAfrica argues that the main barrier is not hardware availability but merchant infrastructure and consumer awareness.
To support onboarding, the company operates a consumer-facing mobile application that allows users to link cards or fund wallets, while also serving as an awareness tool for contactless payments.
The startup says it has already processed more than ₦2 billion through its infrastructure since launch, indicating early traction within its ecosystem.
Competing in a Highly Saturated Payments Ecosystem
CashAfrica is entering one of Africa’s most competitive fintech markets, where digital payments are already dominated by established players such as OPay, PalmPay, Moniepoint, and Kuda, which have built large consumer and merchant networks over several years.
It also operates within a broader infrastructure landscape shaped by major payment processors such as Interswitch and Flutterwave, both of which provide large-scale card processing and merchant acquiring services.
Rather than competing directly with these firms, CashAfrica is focusing on a narrower but emerging niche: contactless payment infrastructure.
Its business model is centred on providing APIs to financial institutions and payment providers, who integrate CashAfrica’s technology into their existing systems. The company earns revenue through usage-based fees tied to these API interactions, effectively positioning itself as a backend enabler rather than a consumer brand.
This approach allows CashAfrica to scale alongside banks and fintechs without the high costs associated with customer acquisition, but it also ties its success to broader industry adoption of tap-to-pay technology.
Regulatory Tailwinds, But Behavioural Barriers Remain
The Central Bank of Nigeria introduced formal guidelines for contactless payments in 2023, providing a regulatory foundation for wider adoption across the financial sector.
However, regulation alone has not translated into widespread consumer uptake.
Bank transfers remain the dominant payment method in everyday commerce, largely because they require minimal infrastructure beyond a bank account and mobile device. By contrast, contactless payments depend on NFC-enabled devices, compatible POS terminals, and merchant education.
For many small businesses, especially in informal retail sectors, the cost and complexity of upgrading infrastructure remains a significant barrier.
CashAfrica acknowledges these challenges but maintains that consumer behaviour will ultimately drive adoption if the user experience proves superior.
A Long-Term Bet on Payment Behaviour Shift
While the company is still in its early stages, its strategy reflects a broader shift in African fintech that moving from transaction processing to infrastructure ownership.
For CashAfrica, the long-term opportunity lies in becoming the underlying layer that powers contactless payments across Nigeria’s fragmented financial ecosystem.
Yet the path to mainstream adoption remains uncertain. Nigeria’s payments market is already deeply entrenched in transfer-based transactions, and changing merchant and consumer behaviour may take years rather than months.
Still, with early partnerships, regulatory alignment, and growing fintech interest in contactless solutions, CashAfrica is positioning itself ahead of what it believes could be the next major evolution in digital payments.
Talking Points
It is notable that CashAfrica is focusing on contactless payments infrastructure rather than building another consumer wallet, signalling a more strategic bet on powering the rails behind Nigeria’s next payment shift.
The startup’s approach of partnering with existing financial institutions such as PalmPay and ChamsSwitch positions it as an enabler within the ecosystem rather than a direct competitor, which could help it scale faster in a highly saturated market.
At Techparley, we see this as part of a wider evolution in Nigeria’s fintech sector where the real value is increasingly shifting from front-end consumer apps to backend infrastructure that supports interoperability and speed.
The focus on tap-to-pay adoption highlights an important behavioural challenge in Nigeria’s payments landscape, where convenience already exists through transfers, but habit and infrastructure still define user choices at scale.
However, contactless payments will only reach mainstream adoption if merchant infrastructure expands significantly and consumers are consistently exposed to frictionless experiences that outperform existing payment methods.
As CashAfrica scales its partnerships and API-driven model, its long-term success will depend on whether it can help coordinate a fragmented ecosystem into a seamless contactless payment network capable of competing with entrenched transfer-based behaviour.
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