Verve plans phone tap-to-pay and AI agent payments for Nigerian users

Verve, Nigeria’s largest card scheme, plans to let customers pay by tapping their phones and, eventually, to let AI assistants make payments on their behalf, according to TechCabal. Vincent Ogbunude, the chief executive of Verve, announced these plans on Thursday. Speaking on the Big Tech and Enterprise Stage at Moonshot by TechCabal on 29 October, Ogbunude described the plans as the next step in removing friction from payments. He argued that the greatest cost in payments is friction, noting that every extra step, from typing an account number to retrying a failed transfer, adds cost.

Growth and New Payment Methods

The new plans build on a push Verve began last year. TechCabal reported in December that Verve had passed 100 million cards and was moving into contactless payments and tokenisation, which replaces card details with a one-time code. Ogbunude stated that Verve now has 130 million cards. Tap-to-pay on phones would let customers pay with a device they already carry, without a physical card. Agentic payments go further by letting an AI assistant, acting on a customer’s instructions, find and complete a purchase without the customer handling each step.

Global card networks are moving the same way, with Visa and Mastercard both announcing programmes in 2025 to let AI agents make payments for cardholders. Verve is the card scheme of Interswitch, the Nigerian payments company. Ogbunude framed Interswitch’s history as a run of fixes for friction. He recalled that before Interswitch, customers had to visit their own bank’s branch to withdraw cash, whereas its network let them use cards at any bank’s ATM, and it later built Quickteller, POS terminals, and Verve.

The volumes involved are large. The Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System stated that the NIBSS Instant Payment system processed about 11.2 billion transactions worth ₦1.07 quadrillion in 2024, which is the latest full-year figure. If Verve delivers, the measure of progress in Nigerian payments shifts from how many people hold a card to how few steps it takes to pay. For a market where most payments now happen by transfer, the bigger question is whether customers and banks will trust software to spend money for them.