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Ask a Nigerian business where its next customer will come from and the answer may no longer be tied to geography. It could be someone who discovered the business on Instagram, a customer in another state or a buyer paying from abroad.
For businesses, digital commerce has expanded the ways they can reach customers and receive payments. Mastercard’s 2026 SME Confidence Index found that 100% of surveyed Nigerian SMEs consider digital and online payments vital to business growth, while 42% already accept online payments and 57% operate across both physical and online channels.
The data points to a broader question: how do we make sure consumers and businesses trust payment systems enough to keep transacting digitally?
Digital Growth Needs Trust
Digital commerce creates significant opportunity. Merchants can reach customers beyond their physical locations, consumers can access products and services more conveniently and businesses gain new ways to participate in domestic and international commerce. But growth without trust is fragile.
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Nigeria’s digital-payment ecosystem offers an encouraging example. Reported digital-payment fraud losses fell by 51% in 2025 to ₦25.85 billion, according to NIBSS. Part of that fall reflects a single ₦31.1 billion incident that inflated the 2024 figure, and part of it reflects a real strengthening of the ecosystem’s ability to detect and prevent fraud. The losses that remain show why security has to keep evolving alongside adoption.
While these figures are not specific to card-not-present transactions, they demonstrate the same challenge facing every fast-growing digital economy, Security has to keep pace with adoption. For digital commerce to reach its full potential, trust needs to become part of the infrastructure itself.
When the Card Isn’t There, Trust Has to Work Harder
This becomes particularly important when the physical card is no longer present. A card-not-present transaction happens when the physical card is not shown at the point of purchase. Instead, payment credentials are transmitted digitally through an online checkout, an app, a marketplace or another digital environment.
That single change has transformed commerce. A consumer can buy from a business without visiting its physical location. A small business can sell well beyond its immediate geography. A payment can be initiated from a smartphone and travel across borders. But taking the physical card out of the transaction also changes the security equation.
At a physical point of sale, the environment gives visible signals that help establish whether a transaction is genuine. In a digital transaction, many of those signals have to be assessed electronically. The ecosystem needs to work out whether the payment credentials, the device, the merchant, the customer’s behaviour and the transaction itself all line up with legitimate activity, often within milliseconds.
When the physical card disappears from the transaction, technology has to establish trust in its place. That makes the infrastructure behind the payment just as important as the experience on the surface.
Security and Seamless Experiences Must Go Together
Security cannot come at the expense of convenience. Consumers expect digital payments to be fast and seamless, merchants want to protect their customers withour putting unnecessary barriers that can interrupt a legitimate purchase, and financial institutions need controls strong enough to identify suspicious activity without declining genuine transactions. Meeting all three of those expectations calls for smarter security rather than more friction.
Tokenization is one response. Mastercard tokenization replaces a card number with a secure token, so the underlying card credentials never need to be exposed during a digital transaction. More than 30% of Mastercard transactions globally are now tokenized, with more than four billion tokenized every month. Mastercard is targeting 100% tokenization of its online transactions by 2030.
The significance goes beyond protecting a card number. Tokenization lets security work inside the payment infrastructure without needing consumers to take extra steps at checkout. But protecting the credential is only part of the challenge, because the ecosystem also needs to understand the transaction itself.
Mastercard’s Decision Intelligence applies real-time transaction intelligence and advanced AI to help financial institutions tell legitimate transactions apart from potentially fraudulent activity. By analyzing signals and patterns around a transaction, the technology helps improve the precision of fraud decisions while keeping the experience smooth for legitimate customers. That kind of intelligence is particularly important because the physical card is no longer providing a visible signal of legitimacy.
This is an important shift in how we think about payment security. The goal is to get better at distinguishing genuine behaviour from genuine risk.
The future of payment security is therefore not about adding more barriers. It is about using intelligence to make security more effective and, where possible, invisible to the customer. That principle is also shaping the evolution of online checkout, with Mastercard working with banks, fintechs and merchants to combine tokenization, authentication and solutions such as Click to Pay to make digital payments more secure as well as easier.pl
Building Trust for Africa’s Digital Future
Technology alone cannot build trust across the digital commerce ecosystem. Security is a shared responsibility requiring collaboration between financial institutions, fintechs, merchants, technology providers and public-sector stakeholders.
Mastercard’s work across Africa reflects this approach. The launch of its Africa Cybersecurity Center of Excellence, initially focused on South Africa and Nigeria, brings together public and private sector organizations to share intelligence, strengthen readiness and build collective cyber resilience. The initiative reflects a broader recognition that secure digital growth cannot be achieved by any one organization acting alone.
Trust also needs to extend beyond the payment itself. A consumer can use a secure payment method and still be exposed to risk if the business on the other side of the transaction is fraudulent. As AI makes it easier to create convincing websites, digital identities and online storefronts, distinguishing legitimate businesses from fraudulent ones takes more than a careful eye.
This is where Merchant Trust Services takes a broader approach to payment security. By combining Mastercard network insights, cyber and identity capabilities, external intelligence and real-time analytics, it helps acquirers and payment service providers identify potentially fraudulent merchants from onboarding through ongoing monitoring. The aim is to reduce risk, and, just as importantly, to help legitimate businesses establish trust and operate with less friction.
For Nigeria and other fast-growing digital economies across Africa, this is an important moment. Bringing more consumers and businesses into digital commerce is already well underway. The work now is to build the trust that will allow them to participate more confidently and at greater scale, which means security can no longer sit at the edge of the customer experience. It needs to be embedded across the ecosystem, in the credentials consumers use, the merchants they buy from, the intelligence assessing risk and the infrastructure connecting every part of the payment journey.
At Mastercard, we believe acceptance, security and privacy are the bedrock of trust. As digital commerce becomes more connected and increasingly shaped by AI, that trust matters more than ever.
The next phase of Africa’s digital economy will be defined by how confidently consumers and businesses can transact once they are online, far more than by how many transactions move there.
When the physical card isn’t there, consumers may not see the technology working behind the transaction, but they should feel its impact in a payment experience that is secure, seamless and trusted.
That confidence is what the future of digital commerce rests on. Making payments possible is the beginning of the work. Giving people the assurance to take part, transact and grow is where it leads.
