Nigeria’s financial stability can no longer be guaranteed through traditional regulatory approaches, and its ability to maintain the stability and integrity of the financial system increasingly depends on sovereignty over the digital infrastructure that powers it.
The Director-General of the National Information Technology Development Agency, Kashifu Inuwa, made the warning on Thursday in Lagos at the 15th Retreat of the Central Bank of Nigeria’s Committee of Departmental Directors.
He told regulators they must move beyond monitoring individual financial institutions to overseeing the entire digital ecosystem, including telecoms networks, cloud platforms, fintechs, and data systems that modern banking now depends on.
He said Nigeria’s rapid expansion of electronic payments, which hit approximately N1.07 quadrillion in 2024, had created a financial system that extended far beyond the direct reach of traditional supervisory models, making real-time visibility across the ecosystem an urgent necessity.
What they are saying
Inuwa said financial stability and digital stability are now inseparable, and that regulators must get ahead of the institutions they oversee rather than waiting for periodic returns to understand what is happening.
- “To achieve financial stability, we need digital stability. Without digital stability, today we cannot be talking about financial stability in the financial sector,” he said.
- “We cannot wait for regulated institutions to submit returns before we analyse and understand what is happening. We need end-to-end visibility of the ecosystem,” he added.
On digital sovereignty, Inuwa made a strong argument, linking Nigeria’s financial system security directly to control over the infrastructure that runs it.
- “Financial stability now depends on resilient technology and…
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