In Nigeria’s fast-growing digital commerce market, payment failures are still a major bottleneck for merchants. Every extra second of latency or failed transaction represents not just lost revenue, but a damaged customer experience. This is where the Interswitch Payment Gateway (IPG) has been making a quiet but significant impact.
Built to power payments for some of the continent’s largest enterprises, IPG is engineered for scale from the ground up. The platform is free to set up, with SDKs and plugins for popular frameworks and a developer documentation suite designed to make integration frictionless. Teams can deploy on both web and mobile with minimal engineering lift.
Where IPG truly distinguishes itself is under load. It runs on transaction processing infrastructure that has consistently handled billions of annual transactions while maintaining a 99.8% success rate. In an industry where failure rates are often seen as “normal,” the gateway offers real-time monitoring that ensures payments clear even at peak loads.
IPG offers one of the most extensive rails among payment gateways. The gateway supports Verve, Visa, Mastercard, AMEX, bank transfers, USSD, QR codes, Google Pay, Quickteller, and mobile wallets such as OPay and Pocket. For merchants with cross-border ambitions, the gateway also offers multi-currency acceptance and, for eligible flows, USD settlement, opening African businesses to global customers without introducing operational complexity.
Security is enterprise-grade. PCI DSS compliance, tokenization, and adaptive authentication help keep transactions safe, while merchant protection tools reduce chargeback risks, a pain point for many high-volume platforms.
Commercially, the pricing is transparent: 1.5% for local cards (capped at ₦2,000), 3.8% for international cards, and 4.5% for AMEX (VAT exclusive). Settlement is T+1, meaning merchants get funds in their accounts the next business day.
From e-commerce marketplaces to fintech apps, and from global travel platforms to food delivery services, IPG’s footprint in Nigeria’s digital economy has grown steadily. For technical teams choosing a payment gateway in Nigeria, the decision often comes down to reliability, coverage, and developer experience. On all three counts, IPG makes a strong case through uptime metrics, scale-tested architecture, and strong operational resilience.
