尼日利亚代理银行：小店如何变身为金融枢纽
On a dusty roadside in Surulere, a neighbourhood of central Lagos, a woman behind a counter cluttered with recharge cards and sachet oil taps a smartphone screen to transfer the equivalent of fifty dollars to a farmer in Kaduna. She is not a banker, but a “pos agent” — one of hundreds of thousands of informal shopkeepers who have become the retail face of Nigeria’s digital-finance revolution, ferrying cash into and out of mobile wallets for a modest commission.
The model is familiar, superficially, from Kenya’s M-Pesa, but Nigeria’s version has its own jagged logic. With fewer than forty per cent of adults holding a traditional bank account, yet smartphone penetration soaring, fintech companies such as OPay, PalmPay and Moniepoint have bypassed brick-and-mortar branches entirely. Instead, they equip convenience stores, kiosks and even roadside tyre-repair stalls with card terminals and app-based transaction tools, turning each into a de facto branch that can deposit cash, withdraw notes, or pay bills without the customer ever stepping inside a bank.
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