CBN Orders Banks and Fintechs to Enable NIBSS–UPSL Dual Links by January 2026
2 min read
The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has issued a new directive giving all financial institutions, acquirers, processors, and payment service providers a one-month deadline to implement dual connectivity for all Point of Sale (PoS) transactions.
The instruction, signed by the Director of Payments System Supervision, Rakiya Yusuf, and dated December 11, 2025, updates an earlier policy introduced in September 2024. The new directive is aimed at eliminating the single-channel bottlenecks that frequently cause PoS failures across the country.
Under the new regulation, all acquirers and Payment Terminal Service Providers must maintain active connections with both the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS) and Unified Payment Services Limited (UPSL). This dual-link structure is intended to reduce reliance on a single aggregator and stabilise the electronic payment ecosystem.
To further reduce PoS failures, the CBN also mandated that routing systems must be configured to automatically switch between the two aggregators whenever an outage occurs. This automatic failover is now a compulsory requirement for all operators. The circular additionally requires regular redundancy and failover testing, with NIBSS and UPSL expected to work with banks and service providers to ensure uninterrupted service. These tests will form part of the CBN’s oversight of payment infrastructure.
Regarding incident reporting, the CBN introduced stricter rules. NIBSS and UPSL must immediately notify banks of any downtime and send a detailed incident report to the Payments System Supervision Department within 24 hours. The report must specify the cause, impact, and corrective measures taken.
With the one-month implementation window, all integrations, tests, and adjustments must be completed before mid-January 2026. The CBN emphasized that full compliance is expected from all regulated institutions to improve electronic payment reliability nationwide.
The directive aligns with the CBN’s wider strategy to strengthen Nigeria’s digital payment infrastructure. It follows earlier regulations issued on August 25, 2025, requiring all PoS terminals to be geo-tagged within 60 days and mandating that new devices be geo-tagged before activation. Operators were also required to adopt ISO 20022 messaging standards and ensure that PoS devices support geolocation and geofencing within a 10-metre operational radius. Non-compliant devices scheduled for checks beginning October 20, 2025, faced deactivation.
The CBN also tightened agent banking rules by enforcing geo-tagging and introducing penalties starting at N5 million, plus N300,000 per day for continued non-compliance. The enforcement deadline for location and exclusivity rules was extended to April 1, 2026, to give operators more time to meet the requirements.
The new dual-connectivity directive is expected to reduce PoS downtime and enhance the stability of Nigeria’s electronic payments system.
About The Author
