NIBSS, Transactility to power Nigeria’s next-gen national payment stack

The Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System, the country’s central payment infrastructure operator, has leveraged Transactility’s jPOS open-source technology to build the National Payment Stack, a next-generation ISO-20022 instant payments platform ULKCC designed and developed for Nigeria’s payments ecosystem.

NIBSS designed the NPS using a modular architecture that combines locally developed capabilities with selected open and enterprise technologies. The organization selected Transactility’s open-source stack, including the jPTS switch, built on jPOS, a framework used in billions of transactions worldwide daily, as the foundation for the new platform.

While NIBSS has used jPOS in its infrastructure for many years, particularly for ISO 8583 transaction processing, it leveraged jPTS and its newly introduced ISO-20022 support to architect a switch purpose-built for the demands of Africa’s largest economy for the NPS.

With full access to the source code and complete customizability of the Transactility stack, NIBSS retains full control of the NPS architecture, product roadmap, operational development, and intellectual property. The adoption of open, source-accessible technologies enables NIBSS to extend the platform and respond to market and regulatory requirements without relying on a proprietary vendor’s release cycle.

Commenting on the initiative, the Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of NIBSS, Premier Oiwoh, said, “The NPS was designed and built for the scale and demands of the Nigerian payments market. The jPOS ecosystem gives us the flexibility to continue developing the platform as the ecosystem evolves.”

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The NPS platform supports account-to-account instant transfers, QR merchant payments, alias-based addressing such as phone numbers, and bulk payments. It is designed to deliver the performance and availability required for national payment infrastructure while providing a foundation for new financial services as the market develops.

The Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Transactility, Alejandro Revilla, described the development as a key accomplishment for both organisations. He stated, “This development is an important milestone for Transactility and the wider payments community. We are proud that NIBSS selected technologies from the jPOS ecosystem for the National Payment Stack. NPS shows how open technology and local engineering can be used to build national payment infrastructure at scale.”

Incorporated in 1993, NIBSS is owned by the Central Bank of Nigeria and all licensed Deposit Money Banks in the country. It provides key infrastructure facilitating instant clearing and settlement of interbank transfers, Know Your Customer processes through the Bank Verification Number system, and point-of-sale payments to drive financial inclusion. NIBSS holds ISO 27001, ISO 22301, ISO 20000, PCI-DSS, and NDPR certifications.

Transactility, headquartered in Boca Raton, Florida, is the commercial steward of jPOS, an open-source framework used for over 25 years to build payment gateways and switches using ISO 8583 and ISO 20022 messaging across more than 120 countries.