• Nigeria's central bank and telecoms regulator signed an agreement giving financial institutions real-time visibility into mobile number activity

• The initiative targets SIM-swap fraud that persists even as total banking losses fell by 51% to ₦25.85 billion ($ 20 million) in 2025

• The move fills a gap that no existing identity tool covers

The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Governor Olayemi Cardoso and the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) Executive Vice Chairman Aminu Maida, signed a memorandum of understanding, on Monday, formalizing the Telecom Identity Risk Management System, known as TIRMS. According to a statement published by the NCC, the portal will let financial institutions query, in real time, whether a phone number linked to a transaction has been recently swapped, reassigned, flagged for suspicious activity, or gone inactive.

Through this agreement, Nigeria, Africa's largest economy by output and home to the continent's most active digital payments market, gave its banks a new line of defense by establishing a centralized platform to verify the integrity of mobile phone numbers before transactions clear.

"Mobile numbers increasingly underpin identity, authentication, and financial access," Maida said at the signing ceremony in Abuja. "Collaboration with the CBN is essential to ensuring that innovation is matched with strong governance, system stability, and consumer safeguards." Maida oversees spectrum, licensing, and consumer regulation for a sector that carries the authentication infrastructure of virtually every Nigerian bank.

The agreement arrives at a moment of measurable but incomplete progress. Nigerian banks lost ₦25.85 billion ($ 20 million) to electronic payment fraud in 2025, the first decline since 2021, down 51% from a year earlier. The decline was driven primarily by integration of the Bank Verification Number with the National Identification Number, according to data presented by Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System Managing Director Premier Oiwoh at the 2026 Nigeria Electronic Fraud Forum in Lagos. Yet a data brief published in January 2026 by the National Institute for Legislative and Democratic Studies flagged that SIM swap fraud, phishing, and insider collusion "remain dominant threat vectors" despite the aggregate improvement. It also warned that a 34% drop in institutional fraud reporting in the fourth quarter of 2025 risked masking the true scale of losses.

Authentication gap

BVN–NIN verifies customer identity at onboarding, but it does not monitor the integrity of the phone number used for transaction authentication over time. This creates a vulnerability: in a SIM swap attack, a fraudster can take control of a customer’s number without breaching the bank’s systems, intercept OTPs, and authorize transactions that appear legitimate. TIRMS addresses this gap by allowing banks to check, in real time, whether a phone number has recently been reassigned. This enables them to flag or block transactions precisely when the risk of fraud is highest.

The MoU also inaugurated two joint committees — one on payment systems and consumer protection, a second dedicated to TIRMS governance — to resolve operational disputes, recommend technical standards, and report progress to both regulators, according to the NCC statement. Cardoso said the framework would extend to sandbox testing for emerging payment solutions and coordination on open banking standards, QR-based transactions, and instant payments infrastructure.

Nigeria's peers across the continent have not yet matched the architecture. Kenya's banks lost Sh1.59 billion ($12 million) to fraud in 2024, nearly quadruple the prior year's figure, according to the Central Bank of Kenya's 2024 Financial Sector Stability Report. SIM swap schemes were among the primary vectors. The Central Bank of Kenya committed in its National Financial Inclusion Strategy 2025–2028 to implementing formal cross-sector fraud compensation rules by end-2026, but the framework is still in the design phase. Ghana recorded 16,733 fraud cases in 2024, according to Bank of Ghana data, and the Ghana Chamber of Telecommunications called publicly in April 2026 for "deeper collaboration across institutions," without a signed agreement to show for it. MTN and Airtel, both present in Nigeria, have integrated GSMA Open Gateway SIM-swap APIs on their networks in some markets. The open is an operator-by-operator commercial arrangement but, TIRMS is structurally different. It is a single, regulator-mandated platform that aggregates data from all Nigerian operators simultaneously and is accessible to every licensed financial institution.

The implementation questions remain open. Building a live portal that pipes real-time data from MTN Nigeria, Airtel Africa, Glo, and 9mobile into a format queryable by dozens of banks and fintechs requires commercial agreements with each operator, API standardization, and encryption architecture compliant with Nigeria's Data Protection Act 2023. None of these elements has yet been defined. Cardoso acknowledged the governance challenge saying the system "will be governed by clear standard operating guidelines and strict compliance with Nigeria's data protection requirements, including appropriate safeguards, encryption, and consent protocols." The joint TIRMS committee's first test will be whether it can publish an implementation roadmap — with a live go-date and published API specifications — before the third quarter of 2026.

Idriss Linge