For fifteen years, the answer to financial inclusion was more innovation. We built payment rails that clear in seconds, a biometric identity anchor and a licensing regime that brought fintech players, payment service banks, and mobile money operators into the formal system. I helped shape parts of that architecture as deputy governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, and I remain proud of it.
Judged on access, it has largely worked. Judged on use, it has stalled.
Today’s financial system involves multiple institutions, but to the customer, it is one system. When something goes wrong, responsibility fragments and no one owns the customer’s experience. That gap — between how the system is built and how it is experienced — is where confidence is quietly lost, and it shows up first in the numbers.
More than 33 million bank accounts in Nigeria were dormant as of March 2025, according to Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System data — up sharply from under 20 million a year earlier. Some of that increase reflects the Central Bank’s own push to link accounts to verified identity numbers, which forced a wave of closures and reclassifications rather than pure customer disengagement. But strip that regulatory effect away and the underlying trend still holds: dormancy has been rising, not falling. Every dormant account represents a data point the financial system reached, counted — and then lost. In a sense, we are victims of our own success. We solved the problem of getting people into the financial system. We are only now beginning to understand what it takes to keep them there.
Dormancy is not simply inactivity. It is participation that failed to become habit, despite innovation and significant investment. That should give us pause.
More than one in five unbanked adults across developing economies tell the World Bank’s Global Findex that they stay outside the financial system because they do not trust financial institutions.
Trust is not lost in one dramatic moment. It drains away through ordinary experiences: failed transactions, unresolved complaints, fraud, and the uncertainty of not knowing who is responsible when something goes wrong.
That fragmentation of responsibility is also a supervisory blind spot: regulation still sees many separate institutions. We regulate a platform-led system with tools designed for an institution-led one. A regulator can conclude that every institution is sound and still not know whether the system itself inspires confidence. Risk has migrated into the spaces between institutions. Supervision has largely stayed inside them.
Nigeria’s Payments System Vision 2028 rightly recognizes that trust deserves greater policy attention. But the first step is recognizing that confidence has become as important to financial inclusion as access once was.
Dormant accounts do not measure trust directly. They measure something just as important: the point at which participation fails to become habit. That is a number regulators can act on, and it points to where the next phase of reform has to start — not with another product or rail, but with someone made accountable for the customer’s experience across the system, not just within any one institution’s walls. Access got Nigeria this far. Confidence will decide whether it holds.
Aishah N. Ahmad is the founder of Bridgforte Centre for Global Impact and served as deputy governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria from 2018 to 2023.