Nigeria has capacity for CBN payment-data rule, experts say
Industry executives and government officials say Nigeria’s data-centre infrastructure can support the Central Bank’s requirement that payment transaction data generated domestically be stored and managed in the country. They nevertheless identified shortages of specialist skills, migration costs and fibre-security risks as challenges before the January 2027 compliance deadline.
Nigeria’s data-centre infrastructure has sufficient capacity to support the Central Bank of Nigeria’s payment-data localisation requirement, industry executives and government officials said at a Lagos roundtable, while warning that the transition could be complicated by skills shortages, cost pressures and fibre-security risks. The CBN’s Payments System Supervision Department issued a circular on June 15 directing financial institutions and payment participants to store and manage transaction data generated in Nigeria within the country, in line with applicable data-protection laws. The compliance deadline is January 1, 2027.
Participants at the session, organised by SPARK and B4B Partners, said the rule is significant because electronic payment transactions reached N284.99tn in the first quarter of 2025, according to data attributed to the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System. Point-of-sale transaction value reached N10.45tn during the period. Ayobami Olajide, Head of Research at Kickoff Africa and moderator of the discussion, said the country’s largest banks spend close to N200bn each quarter on cloud and information-technology services.
He said migration should not be treated as a routine technology upgrade because payment systems require very high reliability. Fola Olatunji-David, technical adviser to the National Identity Management Commission’s chief executive, rejected the suggestion that the policy had outpaced the market. He said no cloud provider in Nigeria was operating at full capacity and cited NIMC’s localised identity database, which he said contains more than 140 million records, including about 100 million biometric records.
He also urged the CBN to require certified migration personnel. MTN Nigeria’s Ifeanyi Otudor said local providers operate under PCI DSS, ISO and SOC 2 standards. He said MTN sometimes provides migrating customers with about three months of free service while applications are refactored, with commercial charges starting after successful migration.
Patrick Gold Microfinance Bank CTO Daniel Babatunde said migration can involve application architecture, networking, security, encryption and connectivity changes. He said his bank’s earlier move from Microsoft Azure reduced foreign-currency exposure and improved connections to domestic payment networks.
This independently written report is based on information supplied by the named publisher. Vertrix News has not independently verified the source report.