As Nigeria’s financial sector moves toward the Central Bank of Nigeria’s 2027 deadline for mandatory data and infrastructure localization, Interswitch’s EVP, Operations & Technology, Babafemi Ogungbamila, joined industry leaders at TechCabal’s exclusive Power Brunch as an expert speaker to examine what the mandate means in practice, and whether the country’s digital infrastructure is ready to carry it.
The conversation, held against the backdrop of one of the most consequential regulatory shifts to hit Nigeria’s payments industry in years, moved past the policy headline to a more operational question: what does “localizing data” actually require, particularly as it relates to payments or fintech companies whose systems, by design, span multiple locations?
“Localization isn’t a single switch you flip – it’s an architecture decision,” Ogungbamila said. “For any serious payments business, transaction processing, cybersecurity, and disaster recovery are rarely sitting in one place, and that’s usually by design, not oversight. The real work is distinguishing what must reside within Nigeria as a matter of sovereignty from what exists elsewhere as deliberate redundancy, because that redundancy is often the very thing protecting users when something fails.”
On whether Nigeria’s current digital infrastructure can support this shift without introducing new risk, Ogungbamila offered a candid assessment.
“Resilience shouldn’t be treated as a box we tick before localization begins, it’s what localization has to build toward,” he said. “Concentrating critical financial data within one jurisdiction can just as easily concentrate risk as remove it, unless it comes with real investment in local power, connectivity, and disaster recovery capacity. The deadline shouldn’t be read purely as a compliance line. It’s a call to build Nigeria’s infrastructure to a standard that makes localization genuinely safe, and not just symbolic.”
Interswitch’s position reflects its broader posture on the localization mandate: that data sovereignty is a legitimate and necessary national goal, but one whose success will be measured less by where servers sit and more by whether the systems around them can hold up under real-world failure conditions. As Africa’s payments infrastructure continues to scale, the company is engaging actively with regulators, peers, and infrastructure partners to help shape an approach to localization that strengthens, rather than strains the resilience of Nigeria’s financial ecosystem.
