Banks can no longer ignore tech failures, Nigeria's IT regulator warns
NITDA's DG told CBN directors that financial stability now depends on data centres, cloud platforms and telecoms resilience — not just capital.
Traditional regulations alone can no longer guarantee Nigeria's financial stability as the country's financial ecosystem rapidly digitises, the head of the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) told Central Bank of Nigeria directors at a retreat in Lagos.
Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi, NITDA's Director-General, delivered the keynote address at the 15th Retreat of the CBN Committee of Departmental Directors, where he argued that regulators must move beyond supervising individual banks to overseeing the entire digital ecosystem that modern banking depends on.
"In today's hyper-connected financial system, the stability of banks is inseparable from the resilience of the digital infrastructure they rely on — from data centres and cloud platforms to telecoms networks and fintech rails," Inuwa said, according to NITDA's official communication published on its website.
The warning signals a structural shift in how Nigerian regulators think about financial oversight. Rather than treating banks as isolated institutions, Inuwa framed banking stability as contingent on the health of telecoms networks, cloud infrastructure, fintech platforms and data systems — a digital stack that extends far beyond the CBN's traditional supervisory remit.
"Today's question is no longer whether we can raise capital, but whether we can protect, preserve and grow that capital in the digital era," Inuwa said. "Trust has become the foundation of modern banking, and that trust must be built on resilient digital infrastructure and effective regulation."
AI and RegTech at the centre of supervision
Inuwa identified artificial intelligence, regulatory technology (RegTech) and cyber resilience as the next drivers of growth in Nigeria's banking sector, positioning them as successors to capital accumulation as the core pillars of financial trust.
He told the CBN directors that the future of supervision is not simply about digitising existing rules, but about fundamentally changing how regulators detect and respond to risk.
"The future of supervision is not merely to digitise regulation, but to digitally transform how regulators sense, understand and respond to risks across the ecosystem," he said.
NITDA's regulatory approach, Inuwa explained, combines formal instruments — guidelines and frameworks issued under the NITDA Act — with collaborative, innovation-friendly methods that allow emerging technologies to develop while standards take shape.
"Regulators must work closely with innovators to create enabling frameworks that encourage innovation while protecting consumers and maintaining market confidence," he said.
The NITDA-CBN relationship on digital payments is not new. In November 2023, NITDA and CBN publicly discussed collaboration on AI and data analytics to deepen digital payments and strengthen Nigeria's payment system — an engagement that has continued through subsequent tech conferences and regulatory dialogues.
The speech comes as NITDA pushes broader national digital infrastructure and inclusion agendas under Nigeria's digital economy strategy, including robust digital infrastructure, human capital development and strategic partnerships. These themes have featured consistently in Inuwa's keynotes at events including the NORDIC Nigeria Connect, the AfCFTA Hackathon and Global Tech Africa.
No specific CBN circular, directive or formal supervisory framework was announced in connection with the retreat keynote. Available coverage frames the event as a policy and thought-leadership engagement rather than a regulatory issuance, leaving open the question of how — and how quickly — NITDA's calls for ecosystem-level supervision translate into concrete supervisory tools.
The remarks signal to startups working on RegTech, AI risk analytics, cybersecurity and cloud infrastructure that Nigerian regulators are open to technology-driven supervisory innovation, with potential implications for procurement, sandbox participation and policy engagement in Nigeria's digital finance space.
