The Central Bank of Nigeria has been urged to expand its oversight of financial institutions to cover risks from cloud providers, telecom networks, fintechs and other technology partners.
Director-General of the National Information Technology Development Agency, Kashifu Inuwa, said traditional regulatory approaches are no longer sufficient for a financial system in which banks increasingly rely on technology providers and interconnected digital infrastructure, warning that an outage or disruption at an external provider could spread across the wider financial ecosystem.
“Financial stability now depends on resilient technology and Nigeria’s capacity for digital self-determination,” Inuwa said while speaking on digital transformation, supervision, innovation and operational resilience at the recent 15th Retreat of the CBN Committee of Departmental Directors in Lagos.
The comments highlight a growing challenge for financial regulators as Nigerian banks and payment companies become more dependent on infrastructure that they do not directly control, including cloud computing, telecommunications networks, payment platforms and other technology services.
Inuwa said regulators must move beyond monitoring individual financial institutions and instead develop visibility across the ecosystem that supports modern banking, arguing that disruptions outside a bank can have consequences for customers and the broader financial system even when the bank itself remains operational.
“We need to be ahead of the institutions we regulate,” Inuwa 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.”
The warning comes as Nigeria’s financial system becomes increasingly digital, with payments, mobile banking and fintech services expanding the number of technology systems through which customers access financial services.
The CBN has itself been strengthening technology-related safeguards, including a directive requiring payment acquirers, processors and terminal service providers to maintain dual connections to NIBSS and Unified Payment Services to reduce disruption caused by dependence on a single transaction channel.
The CBN has also moved towards greater use of automated technology in financial supervision, including baseline standards issued in March for automated anti-money laundering, counter-terrorism financing and counter-proliferation financing systems that require real-time detection, analysis and reporting of suspicious transactions.
Inuwa said the next stage of regulation should go further by incorporating risks arising from technology suppliers, including so-called third-party and fourth-party dependencies, cloud infrastructure, data protection, artificial intelligence and the sustainability of digital infrastructure.
The distinction is important because a bank may outsource a critical service to a technology company while that provider relies on another company for infrastructure, creating layers of dependency that can make it difficult for regulators and financial institutions to identify where a disruption could originate.
Cloud computing is becoming a particularly important part of that equation. Earlier this month, NITDA signed regulatory instruments establishing a framework for cloud computing and digital infrastructure, alongside a National Cloud Investment Strategy aimed at strengthening Nigeria’s domestic cloud and data-centre capacity.
The agency plans to begin registration, technical assessment and certification of cloud and digital infrastructure providers through a national digital regulatory platform in October.
The development underscores the overlap between Nigeria’s technology and financial-sector regulation, as cloud infrastructure increasingly supports services that are critical to banks, payment companies and other financial institutions.
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