The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has been urged to expand its regulatory oversight beyond financial institutions to include risks arising from cloud providers, telecommunications networks, fintechs and other technology partners supporting the financial system.
Director-General of the National Information Technology Development Agency, Kashifu Inuwa, made the call while speaking on digital transformation, supervision, innovation and operational resilience at the 15th Retreat of the CBN Committee of Departmental Directors in Lagos.
Inuwa said traditional regulatory approaches were no longer sufficient for a financial system increasingly dependent on interconnected digital infrastructure and third-party technology providers.
He warned that an outage or disruption at an external technology provider could spread across multiple financial institutions and affect the wider financial ecosystem, even when individual banks remain operational.
“Financial stability now depends on resilient technology and Nigeria’s capacity for digital self-determination,” Inuwa said.
According to him, regulators must move beyond monitoring individual financial institutions and develop visibility across the broader ecosystem supporting modern banking.
He said regulators needed to anticipate risks rather than wait for regulated institutions to submit returns before understanding developments within the financial system.
“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 mobile banking, electronic payments and fintech services expanding the number of technology systems through which consumers access financial services.
The growing dependence on external infrastructure has also created additional layers of risk for financial institutions.
A bank may outsource a critical service to a technology company, while that provider could depend on another company for infrastructure, creating what regulators describe as third-party and fourth-party dependencies.
Such arrangements can make it difficult for financial institutions and regulators to determine where a disruption could originate and how quickly it could spread.
Inuwa said the next stage of financial regulation should therefore incorporate risks associated with technology suppliers, cloud infrastructure, data protection, artificial intelligence and the sustainability of digital infrastructure.
The Central Bank has already taken steps to strengthen technology-related safeguards within the financial system.
The CBN has directed payment acquirers, processors and terminal service providers to maintain dual connections to the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System and Unified Payment Services to reduce the risk of disruption caused by dependence on a single transaction channel.
The central bank has also increased its 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.
The standards require systems to support real-time detection, analysis and reporting of suspicious transactions.
Inuwa argued that operational resilience must now go beyond conventional cybersecurity measures.
He said regulators should also assess the possibility that failures in connectivity, cloud services or digital platforms could affect several financial institutions simultaneously.
Cloud computing is becoming particularly significant in this regard as banks and financial technology companies increasingly rely on external infrastructure to operate digital services.
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 is expected to begin registration, technical assessment and certification of cloud and digital infrastructure providers through a national digital regulatory platform in October.
The development highlights the growing intersection between technology regulation and financial-sector supervision as cloud infrastructure increasingly supports services critical to banks, payment companies and fintechs.
Inuwa also identified artificial intelligence as a growing area of regulatory concern.
He said AI was increasingly being deployed to strengthen cyber defences while simultaneously creating new opportunities for sophisticated attacks against digital systems.
“AI systems themselves are becoming targets for sophisticated attacks,” he said, urging institutions to develop the capacity to use AI defensively while protecting AI-powered systems from manipulation and compromise.
The growing dependence on digital infrastructure has also raised broader questions about who controls the systems on which Nigeria’s financial sector depends.
Inuwa said digital sovereignty should be regarded as part of financial stability because Nigeria could not guarantee the resilience of critical financial services without meaningful control over the infrastructure supporting them.
“If we do not build, control and maintain sovereignty over critical digital infrastructure, how can we guarantee the stability and integrity of our financial system?” he said.
The call aligns with the broader reform agenda of the CBN under Governor Olayemi Cardoso, which includes strengthening the banking system, modernising payment infrastructure, improving financial inclusion and supporting responsible fintech innovation.
Speaking virtually at the retreat, Cardoso said the bank’s ongoing reforms were intended to become embedded in its culture, systems and processes rather than remain associated with individual leaders.
“The bank is in a good place. Our staff have nothing to fear,” Cardoso said, stressing that institutionalisation of reforms should strengthen the career civil service within the central bank.
Chairman of the CBN Committee of Departmental Directors, Jimoh Musa Itoba, described the directors as major anchors of the institution and urged them to use the retreat to develop practical measures that could strengthen financial stability and support economic growth.
For financial regulators, the challenge is increasingly shifting from simply supervising banks to monitoring the broader technology ecosystem that enables modern financial services.
Inuwa said the future of supervision should involve digitally transforming how regulators identify, understand and respond to risks across the financial ecosystem.
That approach would require regulators to monitor not only the activities and balance sheets of financial institutions but also the technology infrastructure, service providers and interconnected platforms on which they increasingly depend.
As Nigeria’s financial system becomes more digitally interconnected, resilience across that wider ecosystem is likely to become an increasingly important component of financial stability.
