Nigeria’s Financial System Generates 41.7 Million Large Transaction Reports in 2025
Financial institutions submitted 41,716,214 Currency Transaction Reports to the Nigerian Financial Intelligence Unit in 2025 as authorities intensified monitoring of large financial transactions across the economy.
The disclosures were recorded in the NFIU’s 2025 Annual Report and covered commercial banks, other financial institutions, capital market and insurance companies, and virtual asset service providers.
Deposit money banks generated 37,214,139 CTRs, representing roughly 89% of the total.
Other Financial Institutions filed another 4,212,466 reports, while capital market and insurance companies submitted 289,296. Virtual Asset Service Providers accounted for 313 CTRs.
Currency Transaction Reports are threshold-based regulatory disclosures and should not be interpreted as evidence that the transactions involved are illegal.
The NFIU said Section 11 of the Money Laundering (Prevention and Prohibition) Act requires financial institutions to report transactions exceeding N5 million for individuals and N10 million for legal persons within seven days.
Financial institutions are also required to report qualifying incoming and outgoing transfers exceeding $10,000, including multiple transactions whose aggregate value crosses the applicable threshold within a single day.
The banking data show reporting volumes increased substantially as 2025 progressed. DMBs filed about 7.04 million CTRs in the first quarter, rising to 8.20 million in the second quarter, 10.89 million in the third and 11.09 million in the fourth quarter.
That means fourth-quarter bank CTR filings were approximately 57.5% higher than in the first quarter, pointing to a considerable expansion in reportable transaction activity during the year.
For the NFIU, the millions of threshold reports form part of the underlying financial data used alongside suspicious transaction reports and other intelligence to identify unusual patterns and potential illicit financial flows.
