Banks File 92% of Nigeria's 42,082 Suspicious Transaction Reports

For counsel and compliance teams operating in Nigeria, the NFIU's 2025 annual report is a compliance road map: 42,082 suspicious transaction reports — 92% of them from deposit money banks — reveal where enforcement attention is concentrated and where reporting gaps are widening. The near-absence of SARs from DNFBPs and the thin 49-STR footprint of virtual asset service providers flag sectors likely to face heightened scrutiny under the Money Laundering (Prevention and Prohibition) Act 2022.

The Nigerian Financial Intelligence Unit's 2025 Annual Report, published on August 17, 2026, puts hard numbers on the scale of Nigeria's anti-money laundering surveillance apparatus: 41,716,214 currency transaction reports, 42,082 suspicious transaction reports and 10,513 suspicious activity reports flowed into the agency during 2025. That works out to roughly 114,000 currency transaction reports per day, a measure of how deeply automated disclosure has become embedded in Nigerian financial plumbing. The disclosures arrive amid a sustained regulatory tightening that has extended AML, counter-terrorism financing and counter-proliferation financing duties well beyond banks into fintechs, capital markets, insurance and the non-financial economy.

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Deposit Money Banks filed 38,715 of the 42,082 STRs — roughly 92% of the industry total — and 8,313 of the 10,513 SARs, or about 79%.

The reporting obligations sit on a statutory foundation laid down in 2022, when Nigeria overhauled its AML/CFT framework through the Money Laundering (Prevention and Prohibition) Act and the Terrorism (Prevention and Prohibition) Act. The NFIU operates that framework in coordination with four supervisory bodies — the Central Bank of Nigeria, the National Insurance Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Special Control Unit Against Money Laundering — which together police compliance across the regulated perimeter. The report's value is that it breaks the resulting data down by sector, effectively drawing a compliance risk map of the entire economy.

The most consequential finding is concentration. Deposit Money Banks filed 38,715 of the 42,082 STRs — roughly 92% of the industry total — and 8,313 of the 10,513 SARs, or about 79%. Other Financial Institutions, a category that includes many fintechs, filed 2,185 STRs and 1,816 SARs. Designated Non-Financial Businesses and Professions submitted 1,029 STRs but zero SARs. Capital market operators and insurance companies together filed 104 STRs and 295 SARs, while Virtual Asset Service Providers — the category covering cryptocurrency firms — reported just 49 STRs and 89 SARs.

For compliance and legal practitioners, those gaps are the story. A mere 49 STRs from VASPs is strikingly low for a country with one of the world's most active retail crypto markets, and it strongly suggests transaction-monitoring maturity in the virtual asset sector has not kept pace with statutory expectations. The total absence of SARs from the DNFBP sector — which spans dealers in precious metals and stones, real estate professionals, and legal and accounting firms — is an even clearer red flag, pointing to a segment where SCUML-led enforcement is likely to intensify. For RegTech providers, the gap between banks' sophisticated filing machinery and the thin output of VASPs and DNFBPs represents a direct commercial opening for automated monitoring, sanctions screening and filing tools built for smaller, less-resourced entities.