Nigeria’s 1M+ ‘POS Agents’ Are Creating A Future That Doesn’t Include Them

Four years into doing business from a small shop in front of his residence in the moderately populated Rumuokwurusi axis of Port Harcourt, the capital of Rivers State; Nigeria’s Southern commercial hub, Justice Asuru fears his business’ best days may have already come and gone.

Asuru, a father of two in his late thirties, takes turns with his spouse to provide basic retail banking services like cash withdrawals, deposits, and bill payments in his neighbourhood, by means of three Point-of-Sale (POS) devices and multiple bundles of cash at any one time. He’s part of the vast network of so-called “POS agents” that have proliferated across the length and breadth of Nigeria. But with three other POS agents now located in close proximity along the same street, Asuru is seeing less business and dwindling earnings.

“It was a lot better before,” he told WT. “Now that there are so many of us, it can be up to a week before I do enough transactions to make the amount of commission I used to...