Lotus Bank Limited has filed a lawsuit against 45 banks in Nigeria over a financial loss of N1,133,808,604.31, which it claims vanished due to a system glitch on its E-Bills Pay platform. The legal dispute, currently before the Federal High Court in Lagos, highlights growing concerns about cybersecurity, system reliability, and regulatory oversight in the Nigerian banking industry.
According to documents filed by the bank, the glitch occurred on July 20, 2024, after a rollback fix was applied to the E-Bills Pay system. The update allegedly triggered a serious malfunction that allowed customers to initiate and complete unauthorised transfers despite having insufficient funds in their accounts. The bank says a total of 718 customers exploited the error, transferring large sums to other banks before the issue was discovered.
In its suit, Lotus Bank stated that the erroneous transactions led to significant financial losses, as the funds were transferred to accounts domiciled in 45 different banks across Nigeria. These include some of the country’s largest financial institutions such as Guaranty Trust Bank Ltd, Access Bank Plc, Zenith Bank Plc, United Bank for Africa Plc, and First Bank of Nigeria Ltd, among others.
The bank contends that it is entitled, under the Central Bank of Nigeria’s (CBN) operational guidelines, to recover the lost funds from the banks that received the unauthorised transfers. Specifically, the bank referenced CBN Circulars BPS/FIRGEN/CIR/02/004 (2015) and BPS/FIRGEN/CIR/05/011 (2018), which mandate financial institutions to cooperate in refunding wrongly transferred or fraudulent funds when duly notified. Lotus Bank is seeking a court order directing the defendant banks to place immediate liens on the affected accounts and return the sums unlawfully credited.
In an affidavit supporting the suit, Gbenga Ojerinde, the Fraud Investigation Officer at Lotus Bank, detailed how the malfunction occurred and the subsequent loss that followed. “The outcome was that certain customers made multiple transfers to accounts held with the defendants in excess of their balances with Lotus Bank,” he explained. He added that the incident was quickly reported to the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System Plc (NIBSS), the body that manages electronic transactions and inter-bank settlements in Nigeria.
The bank further argues that the defendant institutions have a statutory duty to protect the integrity of the financial system. By allowing the wrongly credited funds to remain in their customers’ accounts, Lotus Bank claims, the defendant banks indirectly benefited from an unjust enrichment. The bank insists that justice, fairness, and industry ethics demand that the transferred funds be refunded promptly.
Lotus Bank has therefore asked the court to declare that the 45 banks are obligated to cooperate in recovering and returning the disputed amount. It emphasized that the issue is not merely a private dispute but one that touches on systemic trust in Nigeria’s digital banking infrastructure. “It is in the interest of justice, equity, and fairness that the reliefs sought by the plaintiff are granted,” the affidavit stated.
The case, presided over by Justice Daniel Osiagor, has been adjourned for further hearing in December 2025, as some of the defendant banks have begun filing responses to Lotus Bank’s claims. The outcome of the case could set a major precedent for how Nigerian financial institutions handle large-scale system failures, digital fraud, and inter-bank liability disputes in an increasingly tech-driven economy.
