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Say six-month timeline too short, seek regulator-industry dialogue
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Industry stakeholders in Nigeria’s financial and technology sectors have raised concerns over the Central Bank of Nigeria’s (CBN) January 1, 2027, deadline for full localisation of payment transaction data, warning that the six-month implementation window may be too short for banks, fintechs, and other payment service providers.
The concerns were raised at the inaugural GrowthX by Techeconomy and Technology Innovation and Leadership Awards (TiLAwards) held in Lagos, where industry leaders called for stronger collaboration between regulators and operators to develop a realistic and phased implementation roadmap.
The CBN’s directive, issued in June 2026, requires financial institutions and other participants in the payments ecosystem to ensure that payment transaction data generated in Nigeria is stored and managed within the country by 1 January 2027.
However, stakeholders at the GrowthX conference said the transition involves significant technical, infrastructure and operational requirements, particularly for institutions with large volumes of payment data already hosted on international cloud platforms.
Blessing Ehize, Chief Technology Officer at First City Monument Bank (FCMB), said the absence of sufficient regulatory engagement and clarity around the implementation requirements remained a major concern for banks.
Ehize said banks needed clearer guidance on the specific categories of data that must be hosted on-premises and those that could continue to operate within hybrid cloud environments.
“Now, this is the problem. To bring payment data back on-premises, for the last three months, we’ve not been able to engage effectively with the Central Bank of Nigeria as the Committee of Bank CIOs to get clarity on these issues.
“I mean, you can ask, I’m representing banks. From what I know, there’s not been a meeting held to say, ‘This is what it means’ in terms of clarity. So it’s vague.
“You start thinking, ‘Are we really trying to play with the financial sector?’ This is where we need to start from: draw a roadmap. By this milestone, we should have done this. We really have the capacity to do this as a country, but we just need to plan it and not rush the Nigerian way,” he stated.
His position was echoed by Hakeem Adeniji-Adele, Deputy Managing Director at eTranzact, who acknowledged that the CBN had been engaging the fintech community but said the six-month deadline remained challenging.
“I believe it is quite short, simply because of the amount of load that needs to be moved. I feel the solution should be a phased approach. Compute and storage should be divided into two, as opposed to telling everyone to move at once,” he said.
The CBN’s directive comes at a time when Nigeria’s digital payments ecosystem has expanded significantly. Data from the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS) showed that electronic payment transactions reached about N1.07 quadrillion in 2024, while transaction volumes rose to approximately 11.2 billion.
The scale of the payment ecosystem means that any major change to the infrastructure supporting financial transactions could have implications for banks, fintechs, payment processors and millions of users.
Industry leaders therefore stressed that localisation should not be treated merely as a data migration exercise but as part of a broader effort to build resilient local digital infrastructure.
Dr Ayotunde Coker, Chief Executive Officer of Open Access Data Centre (OADC), said information technology had become fundamental to virtually every major sector of the Nigerian economy.
“You can’t move money without information technology. Even oil and gas needs information technology for its exploration. You can’t operate banking without information technology,” he said.
Coker said the reliability of the infrastructure supporting Nigeria’s digital economy was critical, noting that a disruption in power or data centres could affect connectivity and banking services.
“If you don’t have power, your data centre can’t operate. If your data centre doesn’t operate, your connectivity systems are down. Your banking platforms are down. The entire bank just goes quiet,” he said.
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He said Nigeria had made significant progress in connectivity, data centres and subsea cable capacity, but argued that the country would need to continue investing in hyperscale data centres and infrastructure capable of supporting emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence.
Meanwhile, the President of the Nigeria Internet Registration Association (NiRA), Adesola Akinsanya, said infrastructure alone would not deliver the full benefits of digital transformation without trust, talent and collaboration.
“Digital growth is no longer driven by technology alone. It is driven by what happens when technology, people, institutions, businesses decide to move in the same direction, and at the same time, and with the same sense of purpose,” he said.
Akinsanya identified trust, talent and infrastructure carrying a Nigerian identity as critical elements required to close the gap between Nigeria’s digital potential and its economic impact.
“The gap closes only when three things are in place. Trust that people can rely on, talent that can build on it, and infrastructure that carries a Nigerian name,” he said.
He pointed to initiatives such as the .ng Academy and the implementation of Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) as part of efforts to strengthen Nigeria’s local digital capacity and security.
The issue of trust was also central to the keynote address delivered by cybersecurity strategist and futurist David Adeoye Abodunrin, who argued that the country’s payment challenge was increasingly one of trust architecture rather than payment technology.
Delivering a keynote titled, “Trust by Design: Building Nigeria’s Next Generation of Digital Payments and Infrastructure”, Abodunrin said Nigeria needed to build security, resilience and consumer protection into digital systems from the design stage.
“Nigeria does not have a payment problem. It has a trust-architecture problem,” he said.
His argument came against the backdrop of NIBSS data showing that digital payment fraud losses declined by 51 per cent from N52.26 billion in 2024 to N25.85 billion in 2025. NIBSS also reported that fraud incidents fell from 123,918 in 2021 to 67,518 in 2025, although social engineering and insider involvement remained significant concerns.
Abodunrin proposed a five-layer “Trust-by-Design Stack” built around secure software, resilient payment infrastructure, behavioural safeguards for less digitally literate users, sovereign data practices and shared accountability among banks, fintechs and telecom operators.
He also called for institutions to test their recovery systems rather than merely documenting them, share threat intelligence and measure trust and security performance with the same seriousness as financial performance.
The discussions at GrowthX come as the 1 January 2027 deadline draws closer, with industry stakeholders increasingly calling for a coordinated approach to implementation.
The data localisation policy is part of a wider regulatory push aimed at strengthening data sovereignty, security and oversight within Nigeria’s payments ecosystem.
Earlier, Peter Oluka, founder and Editor-in-Chief of Techeconomy, said GrowthX was established to bring together stakeholders shaping Africa’s digital economy for substantive discussions around innovation, infrastructure, regulation, investment and inclusive growth.
He said the platform was designed to move beyond celebrating technology to examining the practical challenges of scaling innovation and building digital infrastructure capable of supporting the next generation of businesses.
GrowthX by Techeconomy, held in Lagos, had the theme, “Driving Digital Growth Through Innovation and Collaboration”. The event featured technology, financial services, fintech, cybersecurity and digital infrastructure stakeholders.
