Nigeria’s Quiet Digital Revolution

There are moments in this country when the news, for once, is not about something going wrong. Last week was one of those moments, at least in one corner of the national conversation. At the RegTech Africa Conference and Expo held at the Presidential Villa in Abuja, several issues emerged that deserve more attention than they have received.

Nigeria processed over 10 trillion transactions valued at more than 1,000  trillion naira across instant payment systems in 2025 alone. Let that sit for a moment. One thousand trillion naira. In a single year. In a country where, not too long ago, you had to physically queue at a bank counter for an hour to move ten thousand naira from one account to another.

Something is working. Not everything we will get to that, but something real and significant is working, and we owe it to ourselves to acknowledge it.

The conference, organised in partnership with the Presidential Committee on Economic and Financial Inclusion, brought together regulators, financial technology firms, development partners and government officials to discuss what they are now calling RegTech, regulatory technology. The concept is straightforward, even if the name sounds technical. It is essentially the use of artificial intelligence, machine learning, blockchain, digital identity systems and real-time analytics to make financial regulation smarter, faster and more inclusive. Instead of regulators chasing fraud after it has happened, RegTech gives them tools to detect it while it is happening. Instead of millions of Nigerians remaining outside the formal financial system because they lack the right documentation or live too far from a bank branch, digital infrastructure brings the system to them.

The Technical Adviser to the President on Economic and Financial Inclusion, Dr. Nurudeen Abubakar Zauro, put it well in his keynote address. He described RegTech as “the intelligent bridge between innovation and accountability”, a phrase worth memorising. The challenge Nigeria has always faced in the digital space is not a shortage of innovation. We have that in abundance. Our fintech sector is one of the most dynamic on the continent. The challenge has been accountability, ensuring that the pace of innovation does not outrun the capacity of regulation to protect ordinary users who may not fully understand the systems they participate in.

The Presidency’s acknowledgement that inclusive growth cannot be achieved while millions of Nigerians remain outside the formal financial system is the right framing. According to the conference organisers, Nigeria already accounts for more than 70 million active mobile money and digital wallet users, making it one of the fastest adopters of digital financial services worldwide. That is not a small achievement. That is a structural shift in how ordinary Nigerians interact with money, and it has happened largely within the last decade.

The Central Bank of Nigeria also presented its policy vision at the conference, and the language used was more nuanced than we sometimes hear from our regulatory institutions. The CBN said, and I think it is worth noting directly, that its objective is “not simply to regulate innovation, but to create an environment in which innovation can thrive responsibly.” That is a meaningful distinction. Regulators in many developing economies have responded to the growth of fintech with reflexive suspicion, ultimately stifling the very growth they should be channelling.

The CBN’s stated position that effective regulation is not the enemy of innovation but the foundation of trusted innovation reflects a level of institutional thinking that, if genuinely translated into practice, could position Nigeria as a continental leader in this space.

Mind you, leadership in the digital economy won’t be handed to us. It has to be built, deliberately and consistently, through policy choices that sometimes require resisting short-term pressures. The conference highlighted two challenges that cannot be glossed over. The first is fraud. Financial crime losses across Africa’s digital payments ecosystem run into the billions of dollars annually, and Nigeria, as the continent’s largest digital payments market, bears a disproportionate share of that exposure.

The growth in transaction volumes is only an asset if it is matched by a corresponding growth in the security architecture protecting those transactions. RegTech’s promise is precisely that, but promises need infrastructure, and infrastructure needs funding and sustained commitment.

The second challenge is remittances. Cross-border remittance costs in Africa remain the highest in the world, averaging above eight per cent despite years of effort under the African Continental Free Trade Area. For a country like Nigeria, where diaspora remittances are a significant source of foreign exchange, the Central Bank has reported figures of over $20 billion in recent years. Every percentage point shaved off that cost translates directly into more money reaching Nigerian families.

That eight per cent average is a tax on the hardworking Nigerians in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and elsewhere who are sending money home. Getting it down should be a priority that goes beyond conference presentations.

There is also the matter of trust, which was a recurring theme at the conference for good reason. Zauro made the point that citizens will only embrace digital finance when they are confident that their identities, transactions and livelihoods are protected.

This is not an abstract principle; it is grounded in lived experience. Nigerians who have been defrauded by digital platforms, who have lost money to SIM swap attacks or phishing schemes, who have had accounts frozen without clear explanation or recourse, carry that experience with them. Trust, once broken, is slow to rebuild. The government and the financial sector need to prioritise consumer protection frameworks with the same energy they bring to transaction volume growth.

The target of becoming a one-trillion-dollar economy by 2030 has been stated so many times that it risks becoming background noise. Dr. Zauro is right that it will not be achieved by policy declarations alone. It will require the kind of systematic, coordinated investment in digital public infrastructure that turns a vision into a mechanism.

The data governance standards, inclusive onboarding systems and consumer trust frameworks that PreCEFI says it is supporting are not glamorous work; they do not make dramatic headlines, but they are the plumbing of a functional digital economy, and without functioning plumbing, no building stays clean for long.

Still, the headline number stands. One thousand trillion naira in digital transactions in a single year. Seventy million Nigerians are active on mobile money and digital wallets. A presidential advisory architecture that is at least asking the right questions about inclusion and trust. A central bank that is, on paper, committed to regulation that enables rather than strangles innovation. These are real building blocks. The task now is to build carefully, honestly, and with the ordinary Nigerian, not the conference-hall Nigerian, firmly in view.