Guaranty Trust Bank (GTBank), United Bank for Africa (UBA) and Zenith Bank ranked among the Nigerian banks with the highest volumes of failed transactions and related complaints on social media in 2024. By contrast, Stanbic IBTC stood out as the most reliable bank during the year.
System outages and botched upgrades plagued the three major banks, leaving customers frustrated by failed transfers, frozen accounts and long delays in fund reversals. Thousands of unresolved complaints pushed many individuals and businesses to migrate to fintech alternatives.
According to industry data, more than 60% of customer grievances in early 2024 stemmed from failed electronic transactions, with transfers accounting for the bulk of cases.
Cases of Glitches
GTBank faced nearly a million public complaints (941,241) in 2024, many tied to a failed core banking system upgrade and recurring transaction errors.
The October 2024 system migration triggered a multi-week breakdown in essential services, leaving thousands of customers unable to access funds, process transfers, or view accurate account balances.
UBA recorded the highest total complaint volume, with more than 3.2 million cases logged in 2024. Zenith Bank received about 203,787 complaints in 2024, many linked to failed transactions following an October system upgrade. Customers frequently reported inaccessible accounts, long reversal delays, and inadequate communication.
The problem also extended to point-of-sale (POS) payments, where failure rates climbed to 13–15% of card transactions by mid-2024, significantly higher than pre-pandemic levels, according to the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS).
Mobile money providers such as OPay, PalmPay and Moniepoint benefited from this shift, processing ₦41.5 trillion in transactions between January and July 2024—an enormous leap from negligible levels just four years earlier, Ecofin Agency reported.
The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has directed banks to speed up reversals and upgrades, with the National Assembly calling for scrutiny of high complaint rates.
