NIBSS-in-a-Box: Simplified Connection to Nigeria’s National Central Switch

Background

As a leading provider of Software Quality Assurance and Product Delivery services, Assurdly excels in delivering innovative solutions across diverse industries such as fintech, healthcare, e-commerce, edtech and more. While our expertise extends beyond fintech, we have a strong track record in this sector, catering to licensed enterprises that require integration with the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System Plc (NIBSS) for various services, including payments and data retrieval services.

At some point, we at Assurdly found ourselves inundated with requests from clients seeking seamless integration with the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS). As the beating heart of Nigeria’s financial ecosystem, NIBSS facilitates electronic payments and other crucial financial data such as BVN between banks and licensed institutions.

What is NIBSS?

NIBSS stands for the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System. It is the national switch that facilitates electronic payments, funds transfers, and other crucial financial transactions between banks and Central Bank of Nigeria licensed entities in Nigeria.

Integration with NIBSS is essential for these entities to provide seamless banking services, electronic funds transfer, and other essential financial operations to their customers while adhering to regulatory requirements and industry standards.

At Assurdly, we ensure the smooth integration and reliable performance of systems interacting with NIBSS through our comprehensive software testing and quality assurance services. Our expert team meticulously tests and validates these integrations, ensuring compliance with NIBSS guidelines and enabling them to provide comprehensive financial solutions that meet the highest standards of quality and security.

For our CBN licensed clients, integrating with NIBSS was an absolute necessity — as it’s not only a regulatory requirement but also a means to meet the digital financial services needs of their customers. However, as experienced software quality experts, we knew that this integration process was no simple task. From navigating unfamiliar technical structures to setting up complex virtual private network (VPN) connections, we encountered unique challenges that required careful planning and execution.

By addressing these challenges head-on, we were able to navigate the complexities of NIBSS integration and deliver successful solutions for our clients like TrustBanc, Kredi Bank, and others, enabling them to provide seamless financial services to their customers. But as the requests kept pouring in, we realised something had to change. We couldn’t keep reinventing the wheel for every new client, so we decided to take matters into our own hands and create a refined single box solution to achieve NIBSS integration with speed, quality, and efficiency by addressing known issues peculiar to this integration thereby streamlining the entire integration process.

What is NIBSS-in-a-Box?

Assurdly’s NIBSS-in-a-Box solution is a financial services middleware that streamlines the integration of NIBSS services into a single unit, exposing them as RESTful APIs (Representational State Transfer Application Programming Interfaces) compatible with modern systems. RESTful APIs are a way of designing web services that adhere to the principles of the REST architectural style, providing a lightweight, scalable, and standards-based approach to building web services.

NIBSS-in-a-Box is like having a personal assistant who speaks the language of both your business and NIBSS, translating complex processes into simple, RESTful APIs that play nice with your existing infrastructure. No more wrestling with unfamiliar tech stacks or spending weeks on VPN setups — we’ve got you covered. It’s a self-contained solution deployed within an institution’s infrastructure, integrating with its Core Banking System (if a bank), ensuring data security and giving full control to the institution.

But that’s not all! Our solution comes packed with a configuration web portal that puts you in complete control of your NIBSS credentials and configurations which makes changes easy to perform and also gives you the ability to manage your credentials across different environments of NIBSS seamless interface to toggle between live and test environments.

Our NIBSS-in-a-Box solution gives you access to a wide range of NIBSS services, ranging from payment related services (NIP, mandate and NQR etc) to data retrieval services (Account number lookup, BVN verification).

1. Payment Services

i. NIBSS Instant Payment (NIP):

• Inward: This service is only available for licenced entities who are allowed to receive and keep deposits.
• Outward: This is an account — number — based, online real-time Inter-BankFunds Transfer product. This service is a NIBSS legacy electronic payment system. This service allows licensed entities to send money (outflow) to another recipient in another bank.

ii. Easypay (Mini NIP): Improved NIP Outward service which requires no collateral for inter-bank funds transfer by licenced entities.

iii. Mandate Management: Enables Service Providers (referred to as Billers) to create debit mandate instructions on a bank account of its clients/customers for service(s) rendered or product(s) sold.

iv. National Quick Response Code (NQR): Enables businesses to accept scanning-based payments, provide uniform two-dimensional code payment scenarios for institutions, service providers, and merchants, and offer self-service onboarding and real-time transaction notifications.

2. Data Verification Services

i. iGree Integration: NIBSS has developed a consent platform that enables its partners (Service Providers) to retrieve BVN (Bank Verification Number) biodata of individuals (Identity Owners) provided the subject individual (Identity Owner) has given an electronic consent for that request. This operates based on the OpenID Connect authentication standard.

ii. Other BVN retrieval services, including BVN RestFUL, BVN Boolean, and BVN Match, precede the iGree service. However, in compliance with NDPR guidelines, these services, which operate as raw APIs without consent, have been deprecated. They are now exclusively accessible to existing integrators, as all new integrations are directed to utilise the iGree module.

By leveraging our solution to integrate these NIBSS services, licensed entities can swiftly access the full spectrum of NIBSS solutions, maximising efficiency from the outset.

Benefits of our NIBSS-in-a-Box Solution?

• Faster Integration: experience a drastic reduction in integration time, with our streamlined process cutting it down from months to an impressive 2 weeks or less.
• Quality Delivery: our refined solution has gone through several successful NIBSS UAT sign-offs, making the deployed package UAT-ready and further expediting integration.
• Demonstrated Success Across Multiple Institutions: our solution’s effectiveness is validated by its successful deployment in over 10 institutions, affirming its reliability and efficacy.

Who is our NIBSS-in-a-Box for?

Our NIBSS-in-a-Box solution is readily available for any CBN licenced entity who fall under any of these categories:

• FinTech Startups looking to launch innovative financial services faster with seamless NIBSS integration.
• Payment Service Providers offering instant transfers and secure transactions to customers.
• Banks and Financial Institutions looking to enhance their service portfolio and expand their reach.

Success Stories

Here is what a few of our clients have to say about their experience with our NIBSS-in-a-Box solution:

Working with Assurdly was amazing. I had a super satisfactory experience with the team . — Mayowa (Afara Partners)

Assurdly played an instrumental role in facilitating our NIBSS integration process. Their expertise and support significantly reduced the challenges associated with this endeavour, allowing us to efficiently navigate through the integration requirements. Hoping we would be able to leverage that as a foundation as we consider more integration points with NIBSS beyond what we’ve already done. — Ope (OnePipe)

Assurdly’s NIBSS-in-Box offered a plug-and-play integration into NIBSS services, which were key requirements for our product offerings at OK MFB, a company of Mono. Assurdly’s expertise in handling all relevant stakeholders, like NIBSS, made the delivery seamless, and their post-handover support thus far has been commendable. — AB (Mono)

Other clients we have successfully deployed this for:

Payaza, 78 Finance(Bank 78), Duplo, Uniswitch, Source MFB, Firmus MFB, Page Financials, Conpro MFB (Kredibank), Woven Finance, TrustBanc, Support MFB,

Get Started Today!

Ready to integrate with NIBSS in record time?

Contact our team: business@assurdly.com or https://linktr.ee/assurdly

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