By Efosa Taiwo

U.S.-based business analytics specialist Elizabeth Umah says Nigeria’s recurring payment failures are “predictable when you have the right data,” arguing that the country urgently needs real-time transaction monitoring to stabilise its digital payment ecosystem.

Nigeria’s digital payment network continues to face failed transfers, delayed settlements and frequent POS downtime, even as electronic transactions surge nationwide.

Analysts say the country’s banking backbone remains tied to outdated, fragmented systems that struggle to support today’s transaction volume.

Umah’s new analysis concludes that the problem is not the absence of modern tools, but the lack of a national framework for real-time monitoring: the global standard used to detect system stress before outages occur.

According to her, many Nigerian banks still operate with legacy infrastructure that cannot predict transaction spikes or automatically reroute traffic.

With millions of daily transfers moving through bank apps, NIBSS, fintech rails and POS terminals, she argued that the industry needs predictive analytics capable of tracking transaction loads, server performance and failure patterns in real time.

“Payment failures are not random,” she said. “They are predictable when you have the right data. Without real-time monitoring, the system will continue to crash under pressure.”

Her review notes that modern banking markets rely on AI-driven monitoring tools to forecast congestion, prevent downtime and reduce failed transactions by analysing trends in transfer volume, latency, fraud incidents and settlement queues — capabilities Nigeria has yet to fully deploy.

Umah is calling for stronger collaboration between banks, fintechs and regulators to build a unified national monitoring framework, enforce uptime standards and require transparent reporting on system performance.

“If Nigeria invests in modern monitoring infrastructure,” she added, “digital payments will become more reliable, more resilient and more trusted at a national scale.”