The US built world’s greatest card system

By YVONNE-FAITH ELAIGWU The history of payments is, in many ways, the history of making value easier to move. We started at barter and are now at electronic transfers, with stablecoins suggesting that the next evolution is here. New payment methods rarely make their predecessors useless. Cash did not immediately eliminate barter. Cards did not eliminate cheques.

Account-to-account payments will not eliminate cards. But payments evolve. And one of the most interesting examples of that evolution can be found in an unlikely comparison: Nigeria and the United States. The United States built perhaps the world’s greatest card ecosystem. Nigeria just seems to have built past it. The American card system is extraordinary.

Over decades, the U.S. built an ecosystem connecting consumers, merchants, issuing banks, acquiring banks, and card networks. Around it grew credit bureaus, credit scores, revolving credit, chargebacks, fraud protection, loyalty points, airline miles, and billions of dollars of rewards. Consequently, Americans have a compelling reason to use cards.

And use them, they do. Data from the Federal Reserve show that credit-card payments reached 67.1 billion transactions in 2024, while ACH processed an enormous $104.06 trillion in 2024. America, therefore, doesn’t lack account-to-account infrastructure. The difference is where A2A sits in everyday consumer behaviour. Walk into an American store, and the natural question is still: Which card am I using?

In Nigeria, increasingly, a different question is asked: “What is your account number?” That difference is more significant than it appears. Nigeria took another road. Nigeria never developed America’s deep credit-card culture. Debit cards became widespread, but cards did not become as deeply embedded in the country’s economic architecture as they did in America.

Instead, Nigeria increasingly solved digital payments at the bank-account level. At the centre of this transformation is the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System and its NIBSS Instant Payment platform, built to operate 24/7 with most transactions settling in under one second. This infrastructure changed behaviour. Any individual or company can pay another individual or merchant, and the transaction can be executed on a Friday evening or a Sunday morning.

The expectation is still remarkably simple: the money should arrive now. That expectation is one of Nigeria’s greatest payment achievements. America’s success may be part of its problem. This is where the comparison becomes fascinating. America isn’t stuck on cards because it cannot build something better. It may be stuck on cards partly because cards work so well.

The merchant already has the terminal. The consumer already has the card. The bank earns card revenue. Visa and Mastercard provide enormous networks. Consumers receive points, miles, fraud protection, and access to credit. Everyone has something to lose from changing the system. Even the Federal Reserve has acknowledged the economic tension. The better yesterday’s infrastructure becomes, the harder tomorrow’s infrastructure can be to adopt.

Nigeria had a different incentive. Nigeria faced different circumstances. Card payments existed, but the country had stronger incentives to develop alternative digital rails. Rather than building everything around the card, Nigeria created interoperable infrastructure allowing value to move directly between accounts. The result is not perfect. Instant payments introduce their own fraud problems.

So, this is not an argument that cards are bad. Cheques aren’t bad either. They are simply technologies belonging to particular stages in the evolution of payments. America is catching up. The United States has recognized the need for real-time payments. The Clearing House launched RTP in 2017, and in July 2023, the Federal Reserve launched FedNow, allowing participating financial institutions to transfer funds in near real time, 24/7/365.

The rails now exist. The challenge is making instant A2A payments as culturally normal at the American checkout as tapping a credit card. Nigeria has already crossed much of that behavioural bridge. It has also established formal Open Banking guidelines. There is a broader lesson here: technological development isn’t always linear. Sometimes, developing countries do not follow developed countries through every generation of infrastructure.

They skip one. America perfected the card. Nigeria had less reason to protect it. And that may have made it easier to build what comes after it. *Elaigwu is an experienced operations leader with a background in financial services and corporate social responsibility. She is currently Head of Operations at OnePipe, where she drives customer experience and governance.