GTCO’s 200,000 POS Terminals Could Reshape Nigeria’s Fintech Landscape

The Big Ambition

In its 2025 annual report, Guaranty Trust Holding Company (GTCO) laid down a marker: it aims to deploy 200,000 Point-of-Sale (POS) terminals nationwide . The move is a direct challenge to the fintech giants that have come to dominate Nigeria’s retail payment space—Moniepoint, OPay, and PalmPay.

This is not a small bet. The stated goal is to increase the value of transactions processed through its terminals tenfold in 2026, rising from ₦1.2 trillion in 2025 to a staggering ₦12 trillion annual target . It is a clear admission from one of Nigeria’s oldest banks that the fintech playbook—building merchant infrastructure as an engine for payments and customer acquisition—is the one to follow .

The Fintechs They Are Chasing

The scale of what GTCO is trying to dislodge is formidable. As of March 2025, there were over 5.90 million active POS terminals in the country, with fintechs leading the charge . Moniepoint currently controls roughly 38.5% of Nigeria’s POS market, while OPay holds about 27% . These two firms alone account for nearly two-thirds of the market.

The numbers they move are eye-watering:

• Moniepoint boasts more than one million active terminals and processes over ₦10 trillion in transactions every month. In 2025, it processed a staggering ₦412 trillion in total transaction value across its platform .

• OPay similarly has more than one million businesses dependent on its merchant services .

These fintechs turned POS terminals into one of the country’s most valuable financial distribution channels, reaching millions of small businesses that traditional banks had long ignored . But the race is heating up.

The Strategy: Borrowing the Playbook, Adding the Bank’s Muscle

GTCO is not just entering the fray; it is bringing a strategic mind and a deep pocket. The strategy is centered on two key pillars: financial muscle and aggressive pricing.

1. The Profit Engine: HabariPay

Behind this push is HabariPay, GTCO’s dedicated fintech subsidiary. HabariPay has established its credentials by becoming Nigeria’s most profitable bank-owned fintech. In 2025, it processed ₦80.9 trillion in total payments and posted a profit after tax of ₦9.74 billion . To put that in perspective, it earned nearly six times the profit of its closest bank-owned rival, Access Holdings’ Hydrogen, which posted ₦1.65 billion in profit despite processing slightly more total value (₦85.9 trillion) . This massive profit gives GTCO the war chest to aggressively fund its hardware expansion and fee-waiving strategy .

2. The Weapon: “Zero POS Charges for Life”

In February 2025, GTBank removed processing fees on all its POS terminals . This was not a promotional stunt. At the company’s Annual General Meeting in April 2026, Group Chief Executive Officer Segun Agbaje stated: “Zero POS charges are necessary to our strategy. The zero POS charge is for life. It is not a promo. It will continue for as long as this organisation exists” .

This lifetime fee waiver applies to merchants that maintain a minimum monthly turnover of ₦7.5 million . The logic is simple: sacrifice immediate revenue from merchant commissions to rapidly build a vast merchant network that can generate huge payment volumes, deposits, customer insights, and cross-selling opportunities for loans and other financial products . It is a play straight out of the fintech playbook, but with the endurance of a tier-1 bank backing it .

The X-Factor: The CBN’s Market Share Rule

GTCO’s push comes at a moment of significant regulatory flux. In a recent circular, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) introduced stringent market share limitations to prevent monopolisation . The directive states that any financial institution controlling more than 25% of the consumer-issuing market will be restricted to a maximum of 15% market share in merchant-acquiring activities .

This rule, taking effect on December 31, 2026, places a hard ceiling on the ambitions of the current market leaders like Moniepoint and OPay, who have been expanding into consumer banking . For GTCO, which already has a dominant position in consumer banking (issuing), the new rules present a strategic conundrum: it will also have to stay within the 15% merchant-acquiring cap if it breaches the consumer market threshold.

However, the timing of GTCO’s aggressive merchant push, ahead of the rule’s effective date, allows it to rapidly build a substantial merchant base that can be defended in a more fragmented post-2026 market . The rule effectively forces dominant fintechs to choose between consumer and merchant markets, a choice that GTCO, with its legacy banking roots, is well-positioned to navigate.

How Big is the Challenge?

GTCO’s ambition is bold, but the scale of the challenge is immense. Even if the HabariPay rollout achieves its 2026 target of ₦12 trillion annual processing, it would still lag significantly behind Moniepoint’s current run rate of ₦120 trillion per year (based on ₦10 trillion per month) . GTCO is playing a long game of catch-up, leveraging its profitability and zero-fee strategy to build a base that its fintech rivals, burdened by their own consumer ambitions and regulatory caps, cannot simply ignore.

HabariPay’s future roadmap includes more than just hardware. Its CEO, Eduofon Japhet, has emphasized a focus on infrastructure, building a switch that could handle 70% of industry transaction volume, and investing in AI-driven fraud detection and real-time settlement . This positioning—as more than just a terminal provider—is the ultimate goal to dislodge the incumbents.