Anyone who has stood in a Lagos lunch queue knows the ritual: open the banking app, type the account number, wait for the cashier to confirm the alert actually landed. CashAfrica thinks a one-second tap of a phone can end that, and it now has 350 Chicken Republic counters to prove it.
The contactless payments startup signed the partnership with the quick-service chain at a ceremony in Lagos on Tuesday. Customers will be able to tap a compatible phone or contactless card on the existing point-of-sale terminal instead of transferring money or inserting a card.
How the rollout works
The switch-on starts with 54 Lagos branches, roughly 15% of the network, before moving to the remaining 296 outlets across 25 states. Customers pay nothing. Merchants pay between 0.3% and 1.5% per transaction, depending on volume, and banks and fintechs plugged into CashAfrica's APIs can offer the payment option to their own users at those tills. The system runs on both iOS and Android, which matters in a market where cheap Android handsets dominate.
The key point is that CashAfrica is not asking Chicken Republic to buy new hardware. It works through terminals already on the counter, the same approach it tested earlier with PalmPay's point-of-sale network.
Small numbers, big ambition
Founded in 2024 by Malik Asamu, the chief executive, and Bello Opeyemi, the chief technology officer, CashAfrica says it processed 100,000 transactions by the end of 2025. That is modest next to the volume Nigerian payment apps handle in a single busy hour, which is exactly why a chain with 350 outlets is such a useful stage. The company says 90% of first-time users choose tap-to-pay as their preferred method when it is available, and that its partnerships could reach a pool of 30 million users. Both are the company's own figures, not independent measurements.
Asamu reckons contactless payments could go mainstream in Nigeria within eight months. That is a big if. Bank transfers won because they are free to the payer and work on any phone, and plenty of shoppers are wary of anything that feels like card fraud. What tap-to-pay offers in return is speed and the end of the fake-alert argument at the counter, which merchants will value even if customers take longer to notice.
CashAfrica has found a national stage that costs the merchant no new hardware; whether diners actually reach for the tap once the Lagos branches go live, and the other 296 outlets follow, will decide if this is a habit change or a pilot with good branding.
Figures are as reported at the time of writing. STATART news is written by Frank Brother (Markets), Christina Amgbari (Insights) and Ebipadei Joseph (Lifestyle), and checked before publication.