Verve plans phone tap-to-pay and AI agent payments in Nigeria

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. Chief executive Vincent Ogbunude outlined the plans on 29 October at the Moonshot by TechCabal conference.

Ogbunude presented both moves as the next step in removing friction from payments. "The greatest cost in payments is friction," he said, arguing that every extra step, from typing an account number to retrying a failed transfer, adds cost.

From contactless to agentic

The plans build on a push Verve began last year, when it passed 100 million cards and moved into contactless payments and tokenisation, which replaces card details with a one-time code. Ogbunude said Verve now has 130 million cards.

Phone tap-to-pay would let customers pay with a device they already carry, with no physical card needed. Agentic payments go a step further: an AI assistant, acting on a customer's instructions, would find and complete a purchase without the customer handling each stage.

Global networks are heading the same way. Visa and Mastercard both announced programmes in 2025 to let AI agents pay for cardholders.

Interswitch's friction story

Verve is the card scheme of Interswitch, the Nigerian payments company. Ogbunude described its history as a series of fixes for friction. Before Interswitch, customers had to visit their own bank's branch to withdraw cash; 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 NIBSS Instant Payment system processed about 11.2 billion transactions worth ₦1.07 quadrillion in 2024, the latest full-year figure from the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System.

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. In 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.