The Director General of the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Kashifu Inuwa has urged the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to mandate upgrades to core banking infrastructure across the financial sector.
The era of visiting bank branches for daily transactions is rapidly drawing to a close, as Nigeria’s financial landscape transitions toward “invisible banking”where core financial services are smoothly integrated directly into the everyday apps people use to shop, travel and settle bills.
Speaking at the Central Bank of Nigeria’s Committee of Departmental Directors Retreat in Lagos, National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) Director-General, Malam Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi, emphasized this shift urging regulators to pivot from traditional banking oversight to regulating seamless user experiences.
Drawing from his own background at the CBN, Inuwa stressed that the central bank must rethink its regulatory approach, given that consumers rarely seek out separate banking interactions anymore. Instead, he noted users simply want to complete everyday purchase and financial capabilities now surface fluidly right within those moments to facilitate the transaction.
Inuwa said that Nigeria’s modern payment network relies on a complex mesh of commercial banks, fintechs, telcos, cloud hosting providers and national switching infrastructure. As a result, an outage or operational breakdown at a non-bank partner can instantly ripple across the ecosystem exposing licensed financial institutions to systemic risk despite sitting outside the CBN’s direct oversight.
To address this reality, Inuwa urged the CBN to modernize its supervisory architecture, shifting from an exclusive focus on licensed banks to a broader framework that oversees the entire digital finance ecosystem.
Using models from the MIT Center for Information Systems Research (MIT CISR), the NITDA chief made a clear distinction between mere digitization converting analog processes into online forms and authentic digital transformation which requires building an agile ecosystem capable of continuous long-term innovation.
Inuwa urged the CBN to shift from backward-looking reports to intelligent supervision, leveraging AI-driven analytics, real-time anomaly detection, network mapping, early-warning mechanisms and predictive threat scanning.
Inuwa also advocated for a shift in cybersecurity strategy, noting that while financial institutions usually focus on defense and threat prevention, regulators must emphasize “digital operational resilience” ensuring entities can withstand disruptions and rapidly recover when a breach inevitably occurs.
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“Your customer does not experience your cybersecurity policy. Your customer experiences whether the payment works,” he noted, directly tying operational resilience to national digital sovereignty Nigeria’s imperative to maintain control over its sovereign data, critical infrastructure and local tech talent.
He commended the CBN for implementing the national sovereign-cloud policy to ensure local data residency concluding his presentation by urging regulators to focus on ecosystem visibility, true digital transformation and operational resilience.
Inuwa challenged directors to build a forward-looking regulatory framework capable of seeing across interconnected non-bank partners, leveraging AI-led innovation and keeping data within national borders to anticipate risks and preserve systemic stability.
