For most of the last decade, the assumption in Nigerian tech was straightforward: banks are slow, fintechs are fast, and the future of payments belongs to the venture-funded startups moving quickly enough to out-innovate legacy institutions. It’s a comfortable narrative, and it isn’t entirely wrong. But new FY2025 numbers from the payments space suggest a quieter, less flattering story for that narrative — one where the “boring” bank-owned subsidiaries are outperforming the independents on the metric that ultimately decides who survives a downturn: profit.

The numbers behind the shift

Habari Pay, the payments subsidiary GTCO spun out of its 2021 holding-company restructuring, closed FY2025 with profit before tax of ₦9.7 billion — a 134 percent year-on-year increase. Total transaction value processed crossed ₦80.9 trillion, a 195 percent jump from the year before, and gross revenue hit ₦13 billion, nearly double the prior year’s figure.

Placed next to its closest structural peers, the gap is stark. Access Holdings’ Hydrogen posted ₦833 million in profit for the same period — down 42.6 percent year-on-year, even as it expanded its merchant base past 20,000. Stanbic IBTC’s Zest Payments grew revenue fourteen-fold to ₦874 million but is still working through a narrowing, not yet closed, loss position.

Three companies, three holding companies, three fairly different outcomes in the same twelve months. If bank-backed fintech is a single category, it isn’t behaving like one.

Why this is a trend, not a fluke

It’s tempting to read Habari Pay’s numbers as a one-off — a well-capitalised subsidiary riding GTCO’s balance sheet to results an independent couldn’t touch. There’s some truth to that. But the more interesting pattern is structural, and it shows up in how each of these companies is built, not just how much money they made.

Licensing as a moat, not a checkbox. Habari Pay operates under a Central Bank of Nigeria Switching and Processing umbrella licence covering four sub-categories — Payment Solution Service Provider, Payment Terminal Service Provider, Super Agent, and switching itself — plus a Value Added Services licence from the NCC. Only two of the four CBN capacities are currently revenue-generating; the rest sit as deployable option value. That’s a materially different posture from an independent fintech racing to get any licence at all, because it treats regulatory capacity as inventory to be activated on a timeline the company controls, rather than a gate it’s still trying to clear.

Capital patience over capital urgency. Independent fintechs answer to investors who want growth now. A HoldCo-backed subsidiary answers to a parent that has already decided payments is a multi-year strategic bet. That difference shows up directly in balance sheet behaviour: Habari Pay’s total liabilities sit under ₦1 billion against roughly ₦17.7 billion in shareholders’ equity — a conservative leverage profile that reflects patient internal capital rather than external funding pressure to scale at any cost.

Compliance as product discipline, not friction. As Nigerian regulatory requirements have tightened repeatedly since 2022 — data localisation mandates, the NDPC’s expanding remit, the anticipated Digital Economy and E-Governance framework — the compliance overhead that slows independents down has instead functioned as a design constraint for bank-owned players, forcing systems built to withstand scrutiny from day one rather than retrofitted under regulatory pressure.

The honest counterpoint

None of this means the independent-fintech model is finished, and it would be a mistake to read three companies’ FY2025 results as a verdict on an entire structural category. A few caveats matter:

• This data is self-reported and industry-published, not independently audited for cross-comparison. Habari Pay’s own report is, by definition, telling its own story in its own favour. The Hydrogen and Zest figures cited alongside it come from separate disclosures with their own methodologies.
• Survivorship and sample size cut both ways. Three HoldCo fintechs is not a statistically robust category. It’s entirely possible that Habari Pay’s outperformance is idiosyncratic — a strong management team and an early pivot to infrastructure, rather than something replicable by every bank subsidiary.
• Independents still dominate on reach and innovation velocity in several verticals — particularly in lending, savings, and cross-border remittances, where bank-owned players have been notably slower to move. Profitability is one axis of success; product reach and category creation are others, and independents still win more often there.

The real question for 2026

The more useful question isn’t “banks vs. startups.” It’s about whether Nigeria’s payments infrastructure layer — switching, reconciliation, settlement — is a business where being inside a Tier-1 financial group with deep balance sheets and regulatory relationships is simply structurally advantaged, as infrastructure businesses tend to reward incumbents everywhere. If that’s true, the interesting fintechs to watch in 2026 may not be the next consumer app chasing user growth, but the backend switching and gateway businesses — inside or outside a HoldCo — that quietly make everyone else’s front-end work.

That’s a less exciting story than “scrappy startup disrupts banking.” But infrastructure rarely is exciting. It’s just where the money increasingly seems to be.

Sources: Habari Pay Industry Report 2025; publicly disclosed FY2025 results from Access Holdings (Hydrogen) and Stanbic IBTC (Zest Payments).