Nigeria’s online sports betting sector is enjoying a boom as the nation grows more comfortable with the concept of online commerce.

Reuters reported that Nigeria’s 190m residents had been loath to adopt the type of digital payment solutions that had become commonplace in other African countries like Kenya. This reticence was reportedly the result of a general mistrust of online banking and glacially slow internet speeds.

But the situation has undergone a dramatic improvement over the past two years, according to Nigerian Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS) data. There were 29m digital financial transactions in 2017, more than twice the 2016 figure, while there’d already been 10m transactions in just the first three months of 2018.

The total value of these transactions has grown apace, rising from NGN132b (US$367m) in 2016 to NGN185b in 2017 and NGN61b already in Q1 2018.