Banks’ retail deposits hit N39.01 trillion despite FinTech onslaught

Retail deposits across Nigerian banking rose to N39.01 trillion in FY 2025, up from N31.46 trillion in 2024, representing a 24.0% year-on-year increase.

This is despite the rapid growth of fintech platforms competing aggressively for everyday payments, transfers, wallets, and savings customers.

Analysis by the Nairametrics Research Team of the latest audited financial statements and investor presentations covers retail deposits for Access Holdings, UBA, Guaranty Trust Holding Company, Zenith Bank, Stanbic IBTC Holdings, and Wema Bank.

Most commercial banks disaggregate their customer deposit balances, but do not specifically isolate retail deposits as a distinct category. The six institutions in view are among the few that provide sufficient disclosure to enable this analysis.

The growth suggests that while fintechs have gained strong traction in digital payments and small-value transactions, traditional banks continue to retain a strong hold on retail deposits, supported by salary accounts, branch networks, regulatory trust, lending relationships, and expanding digital banking channels.

What the data is saying

The data shows broad-based growth in retail deposits across the tracked banks, with all six institutions recording increases in FY 2025.

• Zenith Bank recorded the largest retail deposit base among the tracked banks, with deposits rising to N11.56 trillion in FY 2025 from N10.56 trillion in FY 2024, representing a 9.4% year-on-year increase. Historical data prior to FY 2023 was unavailable for a full five-year CAGR calculation; however, between FY 2023 and FY 2025, retail deposits grew from N7.04 trillion, reflecting a 28.1% CAGR.
• Access Holdings recorded the second largest retail deposit base among the banks, rising to N9.87 trillion in FY 2025 from N5.57 trillion in FY 2024, representing a 77.13% year-on-year increase. Due to data availability, Access Holdings’ compound annual growth rate was measured between FY 2023 and FY 2025, during which retail deposits grew from N4.53 trillion to N9.87 trillion, representing a 47.5% CAGR, the highest among the tracked banks.
• UBA followed closely, with retail deposits rising to N9.77 trillion in FY 2025, compared to N8.49 trillion in FY 2024, representing a 15.09% increase. Over the five-year period, UBA’s retail deposits grew from N2.41 trillion in FY 2020 to N9.77 trillion in FY 2025, reflecting a 32.3% CAGR.
• Guaranty Trust Holding Company posted retail deposits of N5.92 trillion in FY 2025, up from N5.23 trillion in FY 2024, representing a 13.11% year-on-year increase. Over the five-year period, GTCO’s retail deposits rose from N1.84 trillion in FY 2020, reflecting a 26.3% CAGR.
• Stanbic IBTC Holdings recorded retail deposits of N974 billion in FY 2025, up from N814 billion in FY 2024, representing a 19.66% year-on-year increase. Over the five-year period, deposits grew from N296.2 billion in FY 2020, reflecting a 26.9% CAGR, the lowest among the tracked banks but still indicative of consistent and steady growth.
• Wema Bank also recorded strong growth, with retail deposits increasing to N922.40 billion in FY 2025 from N786.75 billion in FY 2024, representing a 17.24% increase. Its retail deposits grew from N238.67 billion in FY 2020, translating to a 31.0% CAGR over the five-year period.

The rise of fintechs 

The growth in bank retail deposits comes at a time when fintechs have become increasingly dominant in Nigeria’s payments and digital banking space.

Major players such as OPay, PalmPay, Moniepoint, Kuda, Paga, and FairMoney have expanded rapidly by offering instant transfers, low-cost payments, mobile wallets, agency banking, merchant collections, digital loans, and app-based savings products.

• OPay has grown into one of the largest fintech platforms in the market, serving over 45 million users and 1 million merchants, with annual gross transaction value (GTV) increasing from $166.2 billion in 2024 to $358 billion in 2025, and monthly active transacting users increasing from 25.13 million in 2024 to 39.32 million by the end of 2025.
• PalmPay says it serves 40 million users and 1 million merchants, powering more than 15 million transactions daily, highlighting the scale at which fintechs now support everyday payments and transfers.
• Moniepoint has also scaled aggressively, describing itself as a platform trusted by more than 10 million business and individual accounts, with $17 billion in monthly total payment value. Reuters also reported in 2024 that Moniepoint processes more than 800 million transactions monthly.
• Kuda has also deepened its presence in digital banking. In Q1 2025, the digital bank processed N14.3 trillion across more than 300 million transactions, with retail banking users accounting for N8.5 trillion of the total. The bank also reported having seven million customers.
• Paga, one of Nigeria’s earlier fintech players, says it has reached over 14 million customers in Nigeria, supported by its financial inclusion and agent network model. Paga has also scaled strongly, processing N17.1 trillion in transaction value, up 96% year-on-year, after recording N8 trillion in 2024. The company said total processed value since inception reached N21 trillion across 432 million transactions, while Paga Engine now serves 150 businesses.
• FairMoney also says it is trusted by more than 10 million Nigerians, reflecting the broader expansion of digital lenders and app-based banking platforms. FairMoney has also expanded beyond digital lending into merchant banking, with its business banking platform reporting over 600,000 active users, N500 billion in monthly transactions, and more than 600,000 deployed POS terminals.

Experts weigh in

The scale of retail deposit growth recorded across the six banks points to structural advantages that have so far insulated traditional lenders from the competitive pressure fintechs have mounted in the payments space.

Festa Chiwendu Ndubuogaranya, Head of Quant Finance at Rhodium Capital Limited, said trust and perceived safety remain the dominant factor.

• “Salary earners, corporates, and government institutions still view commercial banks as the primary custodians of long-term savings, and during periods of uncertainty, funds naturally consolidate into institutions with established liquidity credibility,” she said.
• Beyond trust, she pointed to the product depth that fintechs have not yet been able to replicate. “Domiciliary accounts and international transactions remain the exclusive province of traditional banks, a structural moat that sustains deposit inflows,” she said.
• UBA, for instance, maintains subsidiaries across 20 African countries with offices in London, Paris, New York, and the UAE, a geographic footprint that supports the kind of cross-border deposit flows no fintech currently offers at comparable scale.

Uyomi Eya, Research and Insights Analyst at Norrenberger, echoed this view.

• “Banks continue to benefit from strong current and savings accounts (CASA) franchises, diversified product offerings, and deeper integration within the financial system,” she said. “This explains why the banks tracked were able to grow retail deposits by almost N6.4 trillion year-on-year despite rapid fintech adoption.” 

On the question of whether fintechs and banks are serving fundamentally different customer needs, both analysts pointed to a relationship that is currently more complementary than competitive, but one that is converging.

• “Even when transactions originate through fintech channels, a meaningful portion of those flows ultimately settle into traditional bank accounts where funds are stored or redeployed into savings, payroll, credit obligations, or investment products,” Eya said. “This is where banks retain structural strength in longer-term value storage.” 

• Ndubuogaranya drew on Moniepoint’s scale to illustrate the point. “The platform averaged 1.67 billion monthly transactions in 2025, up 169% from 433 million in 2023, with those transactions worth over N412 trillion annually. Yet bank retail deposits grew simultaneously,” Ndubuogaranya said. She went further to state that “eight in ten in-person payments in Nigeria now flow through Moniepoint’s POS infrastructure. That is transaction intermediation, not deposit mobilisation.”  

This distinction, both analysts agreed, is what has allowed fintechs to dominate transaction volumes without yet making a dent in bank deposit bases.

Yet both were clear that the current equilibrium has a shelf life. The critical question is not whether fintechs will challenge banks on deposits, but when.

• “The inflection point arrives when fintechs transition from pass-through wallets to primary stores of value,” Ndubuogaranya said. She noted that Kuda already offers up to  12% per annum on fixed savings and up to 8% on flexible savings, materially above the sector’s general savings rate of 7.5%. If larger platforms like OPay and PalmPay, with their combined 90 million-plus user base, aggressively roll out competitive savings products, she warned, “the deposit competition becomes existential for smaller and mid-tier banks.” 
• Eya pointed to a set of early warning indicators that analysts should monitor, including rising average wallet balances, increased salary account adoption on fintech platforms, stronger SME cash management penetration, and slower CASA growth among retail-focused banks. “The competitive dynamic shifts once fintechs move from facilitating the movement of money to retaining a larger share of customer balances within their own ecosystems,” she said.

On the question of what full deposit-taking licences would mean for the sector, both analysts projected a gradual rather than immediate disruption, though they agreed the pressure would fall unevenly.

• Eya put a 3-to-5-year window on any meaningful migration, adding that the most exposed institutions would be those “with high reliance on retail CASA deposits and limited differentiation beyond traditional branch-led models.”

• Ndubuogaranya was more direct on the long-term competitive threat. “The collision course between banks and fintechs is real; the timeline is the variable,” she said, noting that Tier-1 banks such as GTCO, Zenith, Access, and UBA are comparatively more resilient given their capital strength, corporate banking dominance, and long-standing regulatory relationships.

• However, “even these institutions face meaningful pressure on fee income, as fintechs have already normalised low-cost transfers and would intensify that compression with full banking powers,” she stated.

What you should know 

In a recent article published by Nairametrics, a DevOps engineer urged Nigerian fintech companies to prioritise system stability over rapid user growth, warning that recurring service failures risk undermining customer confidence in digital financial platforms.

• Akande Adedayo said the prevailing “speed over stability” culture is largely responsible for frequent transaction failures, particularly during peak usage periods such as salary payments and public holidays, and recommended adopting microservices architecture and stronger backend infrastructure to prevent system-wide crashes.
• He highlighted that Nigerian fintech firms spend an estimated $850 million annually on foreign cloud infrastructure, with local data centres remaining unviable due to unstable electricity supply and high diesel costs.
• Adedayo also flagged cybersecurity risks, noting that threats often originate internally, and stressed the need for strict access controls, encryption, and regular staff training on security awareness.