Verve plans phone tap-to-pay and AI agent payments, CEO says

Verve, Nigeria's largest card scheme, plans to let customers pay by tapping their phones and, eventually, let AI assistants make payments on their behalf, chief executive Vincent Ogbunude said.

Ogbunude outlined the roadmap on the Big Tech and Enterprise stage at Moonshot by TechCabal. He framed both steps as the next round of friction removal. "The greatest cost in payments is friction," he said, arguing that every extra step, from typing an account number to retrying a failed transfer, adds cost.

The plan builds on a push Verve began last year. TechCabal reported in December that the scheme had passed 100 million cards and was moving into contactless payments and tokenisation, which replaces card details with a one-time code. Verve now has 130 million cards, Ogbunude said.

Tap-to-pay would let customers pay with a device they already carry, without a physical card. Agentic payments go further: an AI assistant acting on a customer's instructions would find and complete a purchase without the customer handling each step.

Global card networks are moving in the same direction. Visa and Mastercard both announced programmes in 2025 to let AI agents make payments for cardholders, turning "software that spends money for you" from a concept into a competitive front among schemes.

Verve is the card scheme of Interswitch, the Nigerian payments company. Ogbunude described Interswitch's history as a sequence of friction fixes: before it, customers had to visit their own bank's branch to withdraw cash; its network let cards work at any bank's ATMs, and it later built Quickteller, POS terminals and Verve itself.

The volumes at stake are large. The NIBSS Instant Payment system processed about 11.2 billion transactions worth ₦1.07 quadrillion in 2024, the latest full-year figure from the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System, so even a small change in how a payment is initiated gets amplified across the market.

If Verve delivers, the yardstick for progress in Nigerian payments shifts from how many people hold a card to how few steps it takes to pay. No launch date or pilot scope was disclosed for either feature, which makes the near-term test whether tap-to-pay ships as a live product and what consent, fraud and liability controls accompany agentic payments.

In a market where most payments now move by transfer, the bigger question is whether customers and banks will trust software to spend money on their behalf.