One of the main focuses of digital payments in Nigeria has been speed and accessibility. Fintechs and banks are concerned with how instant transfers happen, how quickly people are onboarded, and how easily payments work across platforms.
While being able to move money in seconds is a feat of engineering worth celebrating, the increased speed of our transactions has also increased our vulnerability. In recent years, there’s been a surge in digital fraud and banking privacy issues.
To process payments or make a business transaction, you provide an account number. In that single act, you often share your full name, your bank, and a potential trail of your habits. With fintechs where the bank accounts are sometimes their personal numbers, the risk is higher.
In a recent conversation with the founder of Flex, a Nigerian fintech, Chika Okere argued that one of the biggest weaknesses in Nigeria’s payment ecosystem is not necessarily the transfer infrastructure itself, but the amount of personal information attached to every transaction.
According to him, fraud rarely starts with one major breach. It starts with fragments: a name here, a phone number there, an account number shared during a transfer, or a leaked BVN somewhere else. Over time, those fragments become enough to impersonate people, manipulate banking systems, or execute social engineering attacks.
“What hackers target is information that makes sense,” he said. “Nobody has all your information at once. They collect it gradually.”
This is what led Flex to build pay tags — unique identifiers that allow users to send and receive money without exposing their account numbers.
The idea itself is not entirely new. Usernames and tags have existed across payment systems globally for years. Nigeria has also seen similar attempts before. However, fraud in Nigeria’s financial ecosystem has become harder to ignore.
Banks are tightening verification systems, regulators are increasing compliance requirements, and fintechs are layering more identity checks into onboarding. Consumers are also becoming more aware of how vulnerable their personal information can be once it starts circulating across platforms. What Flex’s introduction of paytags attempts to do is introduce a layer between identity and transactions.
Victoria Fakiya – Senior Writer
Techpoint Digest
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Why pay tags matter
For most people, sharing their account details has become normal. For Okere, it became the reason to build a fintech startup.
“I asked for a parking attendant’s account number once because I didn’t have cash,” he shared. “The next time I came back, he called me by my middle name, and I never use that name publicly.”
At that moment, according to him, it forced a bigger question: Why does sending money in Nigeria require exposing personal information at all?
Now, Flex is trying to build an alternative.
The solution being proposed by Flex isn’t to replace the banking system but to mask it. By using a pay tag (a pseudonym or a unique identifier), you create a firewall between your money and your identity.
It’s a closed-loop logic that handles the heavy lifting of settlements in the background while keeping the user’s sensitive details invisible. Imagine sending money from an OPay wallet to a Zenith Bank account without either party ever seeing a 10-digit account number. You’re only seeing the tag.
This moves us closer to the models we see with Zelle or Cash App, where the identity is the transaction point, not the bank vault. The logic behind this approach also mirrors what has already happened in other parts of the Internet.
Social platforms moved away from publicly exposing personal contact information. Ride-hailing apps stopped displaying direct numbers without masking systems, and eCommerce platforms introduced intermediary communication layers between buyers and sellers. Payments may simply be arriving at a similar point where users no longer want raw banking details constantly exposed during ordinary transactions.
Building for a fraud-heavy environment
The big question, however, is, does this really stop a determined fraudster? Does masking account numbers meaningfully reduce fraud in a country where personal information is already widely accessible through social media, leaks, telecom databases, and poor data protection practices?
The short answer is that it makes their job exponentially harder. In a verified tag system, you aren’t just a number; you are a KYC-verified identity linked to BVN and NIN. If money moves into a closed ecosystem, it becomes much harder to move out untraceably.
Fraud often depends on connecting multiple pieces of information together. In Okere’s view, account numbers are one of the strongest connectors in that chain because they directly tie individuals to financial systems. Remove that layer from everyday exposure, and assembling full identity profiles becomes harder.
Whether that argument fully holds up at scale is still unclear. But it shows that payments are no longer only about the movement of money; identity is becoming part of the infrastructure itself.
For years, the dominant model in Nigeria’s fintech ecosystem has been interoperability. Recent conversations around open banking have also centred around sharing financial data securely between institutions, and fintech growth has depended heavily on interconnected systems. But alongside that openness is a growing desire for more controlled environments where users feel safer.
The Flex model
Flex operates as a closed-loop payment environment, one where money moves internally between verified users without repeatedly exposing sensitive details. The company believes that reducing exposure points, tightening verification, and limiting how funds move across systems could significantly reduce fraud risks.
That thinking aligns with a broader trend already visible globally. Wallet ecosystems are becoming increasingly important; companies increasingly want users to transact, store value, and interact within contained financial environments rather than constantly moving across fragmented banking rails.
The company says its long-term vision is larger than its own app. It wants banks and fintechs to plug into the paytag network so customers across different financial institutions can transact without revealing account numbers.
The founder described Flex less as a traditional fintech app and more as a closed-loop financial ecosystem.
His analogy is simple: if four people are inside a room passing ₦1,000 between themselves, the money technically never leaves the room. In the same way, he argues, money moving inside Flex’s ecosystem can move faster and cheaper because settlement complexity is reduced.
That closed-loop structure is central to how Flex plans to offer free peer-to-peer transfers.
“Nigerians need a break,” he said while discussing transfer charges and VAT deductions attached to digital payments.
The startup claims that users in the Flex ecosystem can send money without transaction fees because funds circulate internally rather than constantly moving across external banking rails. It is a model that mirrors wallet ecosystems used by companies like Cash App, Venmo, PayPal, and even Starbucks’ rewards system.
But unlike those platforms, Flex is attempting to build this within one of the world’s most fragmented and fraud-sensitive financial environments.
The interesting part is that Nigerian consumers may actually be more receptive to these ideas than expected. The success of fintech in Nigeria has never been driven purely by innovation. It has usually been driven by frustration. People moved to digital banking because traditional banking was slow. They embraced fintechs because transfers were easier and adopted POS networks because cash became unreliable.
Privacy may be emerging as the next source of frustration. Not because Nigerians suddenly became privacy-conscious in the abstract sense, but because digital fraud has become personal. Almost everyone now knows someone who has been hacked, scammed, socially engineered, or locked out of their finances.
That changes how people think about exposure. It also explains why conversations that once sounded niche, like masked identities, payment aliases, or wallet-based ecosystems, are beginning to feel more practical than experimental.
Adoption remains the hardest part of any payment innovation. Nigerians are deeply used to account numbers. Banks and fintechs would also need alignment around standards if systems like this are to work broadly across the ecosystem.
But the larger idea behind the conversation is that the future of payments may involve hiding more information rather than exposing more of it.
Flex says it initially launched as a proof-of-concept targeting 1,500 users. Instead, the startup has attracted roughly 20,000 users organically within its first month. According to the founder, current user numbers are between 26,000 and 30,000.
The company also revealed that it deliberately slowed growth while finalising licensing partnerships tied to microfinance banking, mobile money operations, and payment service solutions. Its next target is ambitious: 2.5 million users by the end of 2027.
For now, Flex is still early. Its partnerships are still forming, its infrastructure is still evolving, and many of its claims remain untested at the national scale.
