By Isa Abdul, Abuja

According to data from the Central Bank of Nigeria, Deposit Money Banks in Nigeria closed a net 476 branches and cash centres between 2022 and 2025, reducing their physical presence by 8.8 per cent in three yesrs.

CBN’s 2025 Statistical Bulletin shows figures for the Financial Sector with the number of bank branches and cash centres across the country declining from 5,410 in 2022 to 4,934 in 2025.

The decline occurred despite an increase in the number of banks operating in the country over the period, pointing to a gradual contraction in physical banking locations.

An analysis by The PUNCH showed that the number of branches fell by 37 from 5,410 in 2022 to 5,373 in 2023. The pace of contraction accelerated in the following year, with 229 locations disappearing as the total dropped to 5,144 in 2024. Banks closed another net 210 locations in 2025, bringing the number down to 4,934.

Consequently, about 92 per cent of the 476 net reduction recorded over the three-year period occurred in 2024 and 2025. The CBN explained that the figures cover branches and cash centres operated by commercial, merchant and non-interest banks. The data were sourced from the apex bank and the Nigeria Deposit Insurance Corporation.

The reduction in physical banking locations came even as the number of banks increased from 32 in 2022 to 33 in 2023 and 35 in 2024, before declining slightly to 34 in 2025. The number of branches operated abroad remained unchanged at two throughout the period.

A state-by-state analysis showed that Lagos recorded the largest decline in absolute terms. The country’s commercial hub had 1,602 branches and cash centres in 2022, but the figure fell to 1,532 in 2023 and 1,521 in 2024 before dropping further to 1,444 in 2025.

This meant banks closed a net 158 locations in Lagos within three years, representing a 9.9 per cent reduction. The state alone accounted for about one-third of the net decline recorded nationwide.

Despite the reduction, Lagos remained the dominant location for physical banking operations, accounting for about 29 per cent of the country’s 4,934 branches and cash centres in 2025.

The Federal Capital Territory also recorded a decline. The number of locations in Abuja stood at 400 in both 2022 and 2023 before falling to 391 in 2024 and 362 in 2025. This represented a net reduction of 38 branches and cash centres, or 9.5 per cent, over the three-year period.

Ekiti suffered one of the steepest contractions, with its branch network almost halving from 107 locations in 2022 to 57 in 2025, representing a decline of 50 locations or 46.7 per cent.

Enugu followed with a reduction of 44 locations from 162 to 118, while Oyo lost 41, declining from 237 to 196. Other states that recorded sizeable declines included Ondo, where the number fell from 127 to 105; Plateau, from 80 to 61; Osun, from 113 to 96; Cross River, from 83 to 67; and Rivers, from 290 to 275.

The decline was also evident in some of the major commercial centres in northern Nigeria. Kano increased its physical banking locations from 164 in 2022 to 175 in 2023 and 183 in 2024. However, the number fell sharply to 157 in 2025, leaving the state with seven fewer locations than it had three years earlier.

Kaduna followed a similar pattern, rising from 148 locations in 2022 to 156 in 2023 and 164 in 2024 before dropping to 146 in 2025.

Some states, however, recorded an expansion in their banking networks. Delta added 23 locations, with its total increasing from 173 in 2022 to 196 in 2025. Edo also rose from 155 to 165, while Jigawa increased from 31 to 37 and Kogi from 63 to 68.

The data further showed wide disparities in the distribution of physical banking infrastructure across the country. While Lagos alone had 1,444 locations in 2025, Yobe had 23, Taraba 26 and Zamfara 28. Bayelsa and Gombe had 31 each, while Ebonyi recorded 32.

For instance, Lagos alone accounted for more than 29 per cent of all branches and cash centres nationwide in 2025, highlighting the concentration of physical banking infrastructure in the country’s major economic centre.

The latest figures indicate that the contraction in the industry’s physical footprint has accelerated in recent years, underscoring how rapidly banking is migrating from brick-and-mortar to electronic platforms.

The PUNCH recently reported that the Central Bank of Nigeria called for greater adoption of alternative payment channels to expand access to financial services and stimulate economic activity.

Acting Director, Corporate Communications and Investor Relations Department of the CBN, Hakama Sidi-Ali, made the call at the 2026 CBN Fair in Lokoja, Kogi State.

Represented by Zubairu Salihu, Branch Controller of the CBN Lokoja Branch, she said alternative payment channels were particularly important for farmers, traders, small businesses and informal-sector operators who may have limited access to conventional banking services.

–Services include electric vehicle charging, liquefied petroleum gas, CNG, others

By Nick Ibe, Abuja

The Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited has introduced the self-service fuel pumps at selected NNPC Retail stations, allowing motorists to dispense petrol themselves using a mobile application.

This, partly, is NNPC’s new policy to deploy between 50 and 70 smart, self-service stations across the country in the next six months.

This model is different from the old fashion pattern where attendants dispensed fuel to customers. The self-service model allows customers to select the amount of fuel they want, make payment through an app and use a code to activate the pump.

NNPC Retail shared the guide on its X handle on Friday giving motorists details of how to use the system.

The step-by-step guide on how to buy and dispense fuel yourself at participating NNPC stations:

Step 1: Motorists who want to use the self-service facility should first download the NRL Fuel App. Get the download link from the NNPC X handle.

Step 2: Open the app, tap Fuel Purchase, and select your fuel type.

Step 3: Browse the station list and choose an NNPC Retail station offering the self-service option.

Look for the green Self-Serve badge next to the station name. Tap it to select.

Step 3: After selecting the station, enter the amount you wish to spend on fuel. Review the quantity and price, then tap Pay from Wallet. The system will process the transaction based on the amount entered.

Step 4: Once the payment is successful, the app will generate a digital receipt. It contains your Order ID, your Self-Service Code, and a QR Code.

Step 5: At the pump, enter your 8-digit self-service code on the terminal and press the hash key. Once validated, pick up the nozzle and fuel up—exactly the amount you paid for.

NNPC Executive Vice President, Downstream, Mumuni Dagazau, said the new model was part of the company’s plan to transform conventional filling stations into broader energy and mobility hubs.

At the newly commissioned smart station on Bill Clinton Drive, Airport Road, Abuja, NNPC Retail Executive Director, Retail Operations and Mobility, Shettima Baba-Kukawa, said customers could complete transactions on their phones and dispense the exact amount of fuel purchased.

NNPC said the smart stations would combine conventional petrol sales with services such as electric vehicle charging, liquefied petroleum gas, compressed natural gas and other mobility services.

Maria Davidson: Building a Business
At Age 26

She Was a Construction Industry Outsider. Within 5 Years, Her Business Was Bringing In $5 Billion In Orders.

Maria Davidson got the idea for Kojo by showing up on construction job sites with pizza and donuts.

Kojo is the largest construction materials procurement platform in the U.S.
Its founder, Maria Davidson, was an outsider to construction when she decided to create the company.
Davidson relied on conversations she had with “thousands” of construction workers about pain points in the industry to create Kojo.

Eleven years ago, Maria Davidson was 23 years-old, living in London and working in an entry-level job as an investment banking analyst at Goldman Sachs when she went on vacation in California. While there, she had a chance encounter with Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir and founder of the venture firm 8VC. This meeting changed the trajectory of her life; in a single hour, he convinced her to quit her job, move to San Francisco and become his chief of staff at 8VC. Lonsdale saw potential in Davidson, and the 8VC team at the time was small.

“He gave me this pitch that Goldman is an incredible place, but you are a cog in a giant wheel,” Davidson tells Entrepreneur in a new interview. “There were so many industries that no one was paying attention to on the tech side in the U.S. He got me really passionate about doing something to help improve how those industries work.”

So, in 2015, at the age of 23, Davidson decided to move to the U.S. She knew precisely three people in California at the start, and lived on her friend’s couch for a while as she searched for a place to live longer term.

Maria Davidson. Credit: Kojo
Maria Davidson. Credit: Kojo
Working with Lonsdale at 8VC exposed her to “big, traditionally unsexy industries” full of broken workflows that affected millions of people but had seen little modern software. So at age 26, in 2018, she left 8VC to start Kojo, committing to spend the next eight years tackling one of the most complex of those industries: construction.

In a handful of years, Kojo was processing more than $5 billion in annual orders and became the largest construction materials procurement platform in the country.

How she got started
Davidson’s path to founding Kojo began far from Silicon Valley. “I got here in a very roundabout way, as many immigrants do,” she says.

She was born in the Soviet Union, then moved to Israel after the Soviet Union collapsed, without knowing a word of Hebrew. She then moved to London when she was 13 without speaking a word of English, completed school there and went on to study politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford. Her first taste of entrepreneurship was running the Oxford Union.

After college, she worked at Goldman Sachs for a couple of years. “I thought I needed to do the traditional route and follow the traditional wisdom,” she says.

Seeing a broken system
Davidson built Kojo around a simple question: why does it take so long, and cost so much, to build the physical world around us? She points out that the Empire State Building took only about 400 days to construct in the early 1930s, yet something as simple as a San Francisco bus lane took 27 years to complete. Projects, from hospitals to schools, are routinely late and over budget, slowing down city development.

Digging deeper, Davidson realized that for those in the trades, from electricians to plumbers to roofers, roughly 60% of costs are for labor and 40% are for materials. These tradespeople order more than $400 billion worth of commercial materials annually across the U.S. — yet the supply chain for those materials runs on phone calls, emails and text messages. There is little transparency about price, availability or inventory. Mistakes are common: wrong items arriving, double orders, materials lost in warehouses and field teams constantly chasing information.

As a complete industry outsider, Davidson started the process of identifying the problem by showing up on construction job sites with pizza and donuts to get workers to talk. She asked what slowed workers down, what caused delays and what they most hated doing.

“As I had thousands of conversations, I heard time and time again that materials were incredibly frustrating,” Davidson says. “That includes how people dealt with and tracked them. There was very little visibility into when materials were actually arriving and what materials had already been ordered.”

That feedback pushed her to focus on a real-world problem that construction workers felt every day.

Launching the product
The early years were spent simply figuring out what to build. Davidson founded Kojo in 2018, but didn’t bring a product to market until 2020. Kojo’s core product is a procurement platform that unifies field teams, office staff, and distributors in one place. It automates price and inventory comparisons, purchase order creation and communication.

Kojo officially launched the product in the summer of 2020, even though COVID hit and the team briefly feared the company was over. Instead, remote work and illness exposed just how risky it was to have purchasing data trapped in email inboxes and binders. Kojo’s sales took off as contractors sought centralized, digital visibility into materials.

Kojo grew astonishingly fast once it launched. In mid-2020, it was processing $0 in materials orders. Within five years, it was handling over $5 billion annually across more than 75,000 job sites, Davidson discloses.

She adds that the company saved over two million labor hours for construction workers last year alone, by cutting field workers’ time on phones and emails and eliminating about 75% of office teams’ manual data entry.

On the materials side, Kojo helps contractors save roughly 3% to 5% per order, according to Davidson.

The company raised a $7 million Series A in the fall of 2020, a $33 million Series B in the fall of 2021 and a $39 million Series C in the fall of 2022. In the fall of 2025, Kojo raised a $10 million Series C extension from Wesco, the largest electrical distributor in the U.S.

Early on, many investors told Davidson that construction firms didn’t want software. She relied on a handful of believers and small early checks to build a prototype. Only from the Series A funding round onward did strong metrics and customer enthusiasm start to flip investor sentiment.

Tactics for growth
Davidson says that the most important strategy for growth is building close relationships with customers from the very beginning. She understood from the start that construction is a word-of-mouth industry. The most important thing to do in the early days, she says, was to build an “extremely loyal” group of evangelists who loved the product and told everyone around them about it.

From that point, Davidson started hiring a sales team that was constantly on the phone with contractors, asking about their biggest pain points. The team tried to figure out the issues and send feedback to the product division, so that the product was constantly improving over time.

Through the process of scaling from zero to $5 billion, Davidson also realized that there are a lot of things that traditional investor wisdom tells you to do that you should actually not do.

She gave the example of investors urging her to hire seasoned executives with fancy titles after a fresh funding round. Instead of following that wisdom, she relied on internal promotions to make Kojo grow.

“What we found is being able to promote people from within allowed us to scale our teams much more effectively because those people knew how to do the work,” Davidson says. “They actually knew the product, they knew the customer.”

Davidson adds that it was important for her to approach a field like construction with a true beginner’s mindset. She didn’t have any preconceived notions about the way things worked and was able to assess the industry with a fresh pair of eyes.

She also emphasizes deep curiosity — when a process looks broken, there is usually a reason it evolved that way.

“If you want to solve it, you need to solve from a place of empathy and understanding why things are the way they are today,” Davidson says.

This article is part of Young Entrepreneur series highlighting the stories, challenges and triumphs of being a young business owner.