Lagos' tech crown is tarnished. Interswitch, one of Africa's most established payments infrastructure companies processing millions of transactions daily, lost ₦30 billion ($40 million) to an insider fraud scheme that exploited a system vulnerability for years—and the company never told the public.
Court documents from 2023 revealed that a system glitch in Interswitch's chargeback processing allowed merchants to fraudulently file and receive transaction reversals. Chargebacks are supposed to protect customers who dispute payments. Instead, former and current employees who understood exactly where the vulnerability was exploited it quietly, siphoning billions.
By the time the fraud surfaced, Interswitch had lost ₦30 billion. The company recovered about ₦10 billion through emergency legal motions freezing accounts across 54 banks and referring the case to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC). At least one arrest was made.
What Interswitch did not do: make an official public statement.
In Nigeria, as across Africa's giants, challenges are real but entrepreneurial energy and cultural creativity drive progress. Yet this silence threatens the very foundation of that progress. Lagos has surpassed $5 billion in tech startup funding, cementing Nigeria's position as Africa's leading technology hub. The sector employs thousands of young, educated Nigerians—over 60% of the population is under 25—and demonstrates the nation's entrepreneurial dynamism overcoming infrastructure challenges.
But trust is fragile. Adeola Ogunwole, a fintech analyst at Lagos Business School, notes that "when a payments giant like Interswitch suffers a ₦30 billion loss without public disclosure, it raises questions about transparency standards across the entire sector."
The concern is not just the magnitude of the loss—it's what the silence reveals. A chargeback system processing billions of naira had no anomaly detection capable of flagging unusual patterns over multiple years. The only reason this became public was because Interswitch needed the courts to freeze accounts, and the documents became visible through legal proceedings.
