On October 1, NIPOST switched on an eleven-character postcode for every addressable building. I first read about it on LinkedIn, where it was shared by Dr. Bosun Tijani, Nigeria’s Minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy, and a mutual connection of mine. Within a day, Nigerians were on X (formerly Twitter) testing it. One person found his exact building and called it “insanely accurate.” Another found that his house shared a code with the door next to it. A third, in Oyo, found no code for his town at all. That is what infrastructure looks like on day one.

The new postcode is the latest attempt to give every location in Nigeria a verifiable digital identity. When it works, it will be impactful to key sectors like commerce, banking, lending etc. For example, your checkout form fills in your address from a code instead of a text box. A rider stops calling to ask which gate. A landlord’s utility bill stops being the only proof of residence, the document that currently stands between most Nigerian renters and a Tier 3 account, where lending opens. The code belongs to the building, not the occupant, so it survives tenants.

Previous initiatives, including the six-digit postcode in 1986, missed street names and house numbers, making it useless. This time, NIPOST is building on the National Population Commission’s enumeration work between 2014 and 2022, which recorded buildings, roads and footpaths nationwide. America needed twenty years to make its code precise, from the ZIP+4 in 1983; now every American doorstep carries an eleven-digit number. Canada tested a six-character code, in Ottawa in April 1971, that resolves to a city block or a single high-rise. South Africa is the closer case. It has used four digits since 1975, and rural delivery still runs on PO boxes and village names.

Now that the new postcode has launched, does it have potential as a digital “location” rail?

For context, Nigeria already runs two rails.

The first is the “identity” rail, and it has two sides. The BVN (Bank Verification Number) sits at 70.3 million enrolments as of 28 September and became universal when the Central Bank made unverified accounts unusable. NIN (National Identity Number) has passed 100 million and is now the second identifier for every higher-tier account.

The second rail is “payments”. Powered by NIBSS, it is the rail every fintech company in the country rides on, moving N1.07 quadrillion in 2024 alone across 11.2 billion transfers.

Between these two national rails, companies are building better KYC, lending and infrastructure for payments and inventory. NIBSS is already fusing the three, describing its new payment stack as bringing payments, identity and data onto a single intelligent rail.

We are getting closer to the era of location, identity and payment rails.

Nigeria has proven we can build identity and payment rails at a national level; the next is location.

For the postcode to be the next rail, scaling it is very important. But not every good Nigerian idea scales, especially if revenue is considered its ultimate objective. A rail is only a rail when someone other than its owner can build on it and when it produces use cases that make it indispensable to the tech economy, the government, and businesses. Unlike BVN and NIN, It’s safe to say that nobody can be forced to know their postcode. So how the government thinks about adoption matters as much as how NIPOST built the mapping.

.A lesson from the USA is that the adoption of its ZIP code moved only after postage discounts were introduced and the US Postal Service has lost money every year since 2007, while it built the “location” layer that American retail sits on.

Back to my question, will the postcode be the next national digital rail? Adoption will tell.

Bio: Wole Ogunlade has spent over a decade building and scaling technology businesses in payments, mobility and SaaS. He is currently the founding partner at Kryssen, a creative agency specialised in writing content that drives revenue and traffic for B2B companies. (Guardian)

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