HabariPay, the payments subsidiary of Guaranty Trust Holding Company (GTCO), made ₦7.81 billion in profit after tax in the first half of 2026, up 94.3% from ₦4.02 billion a year earlier, according to GTCO’s H1 results analysed by The Condia. The wider group reported ₦603 billion in profit before tax.
Key figures
- Operating income: ₦8.83 billion, up from ₦4.61 billion
- Total assets: ₦1.42 trillion at June 2026, up from ₦880.1 billion a year earlier
Three businesses in one
- Payment gateway: collects payments by virtual account, USSD, card and bank transfer for tech companies, corporates, SMEs and small merchants.
- Switching: processes account-to-account transfers and card transactions. HabariPay built its own switch, and its CEO Eduofon Japhet said in 2025 that 12 to 13 banks and major fintechs were connected.
- Value-added services: airtime, bulk SMS and similar products.
Competition moves “down the stack”
“The apps and interfaces customers see are easy to copy. The infrastructure underneath them is not,” senior product manager Joseph Edike told The Condia. Banks already have licences, settlement accounts and deposits, which many fintechs rely on them for. That lets a bank compete with fintechs for customers while also selling them the rails they run on.
The market is large and growing. The CBN says almost 11 billion transactions went through the NIBSS Instant Payment system in 2024, more than double 2022. NIBSS said in August that its new National Payment Stack had processed 26.55 million transactions worth ₦1.4 trillion across 48 institutions during its rollout.
Why it matters
With interest margins under pressure, payments are becoming a core profit line for Nigerian banks, not a side project. Expect more banks to organise payment businesses the way GTCO has. The open question is whether fintechs will trust infrastructure owned by a direct competitor.
Source: The Condia, using GTCO’s H1 2026 financial statements.
