CashAfrica Pushes Tap-to-Pay Infrastructure in Nigeria

In Short

• CashAfrica wants tap-to-pay (contactless) payments to become common in Nigeria.
• The startup is positioning itself as infrastructure for payment providers, not a consumer wallet.
• It has leaned on partnerships with PalmPay and ChamsSwitch to pilot and scale.

What Happened

CashAfrica is betting that contactless payments, where customers tap a phone or card on a terminal instead of using cash or bank transfer, can gain real adoption in Nigeria.

The company is building the backend rails that other payment businesses can use. In practice, that means integrating with POS terminals and payment partners, so merchants can accept tap-to-pay alongside existing methods like transfers, USSD (short codes on feature phones), and card payments.

One early partnership was with PalmPay. CashAfrica said it rolled out tap-to-pay features on 1,000 PalmPay POS terminals during a 2025 pilot.

A second partnership with ChamsSwitch focuses on switching and settlement. Switching is the plumbing that routes a payment from the terminal to the right bank or issuer. Settlement is the step where money is actually moved and reconciled between parties after the payment is approved.

CashAfrica says this setup also helps with compliance, meaning meeting regulatory and risk requirements that banks and large financial institutions expect before they deploy new payment infrastructure.

Why It Matters

Nigeria is still heavily cash and transfer-driven at the point of sale. For tap-to-pay to work at scale, the ecosystem needs more than a mobile app, it needs reliable switching, settlement, and bank-grade compliance.

If CashAfrica can prove stable performance through partners and regulated rails, it could reduce friction for banks and fintechs that want to offer contactless payments. The company also sees this as a path toward a local alternative to global tap-to-pay wallets, though that will likely depend on device support, merchant coverage, and regulatory comfort.

For founders and operators in payments, the key signal is that infrastructure plays are still emerging in Nigeria’s POS market, especially those aimed at making card and phone taps feel as normal as “cash or transfer.”