Understanding Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) through Nigeria's NIBSS NIP real time payments layer.

That Trust can be fostered through central banking has been established through the work of scholars such as Roseveare, Carruthers, and Haber, North and Weingast amongst others, who focused on English institutional development and the role of elite politics in this institutional development. These scholars have established that Trust “flows downhill”, that is, it is constructed top-bottom, from how apex regulatory institutions manage national finances. Whether these apex regulatory institutions are competently run or not in turn shapes the formation of Trust “midstream” and “downhill” in the economy. In this extract I briefly consider this problem in contemporary Nigeria, discussing the implementation of fast (or real-time) payments, the NIP, which has revolutionized financial inclusion for millions of Nigerians, particularly MSMEs in the country. Within the context of DPIs, the NIP has been described as the payments layer of Nigeria’s DPI , which also includes the Digital ID administered by NIMC, and a consent-based data exchange administered by the Nigeria Data Protection Commission.