Stakeholders have faulted the Central Bank of Nigeria’s (CBN) directive mandating the full local storage and management of payment transaction data, accusing the regulator of not actively engaging industry leaders on relevant issues.

While the apex bank views data localisation as a vital step towards safeguarding digital sovereignty and improving regulatory oversight, industry stakeholders continue to raise concerns over what they described as vague regulatory definitions and an aggressive compliance timeline.

The concerns formed part of major discussions in Lagos yesterday during a panel session at the GrowthX Forum, organised by TechEconomy. Key technology leaders and banking executives expressed concern that the six-month timeline is unrealistic.

Panellists argued that forcing full migration to local servers by January 2027 risks encouraging institutions to pursue superficial “box-ticking” compliance rather than building operational resilience.

The Chief Technology Officer of FCMB, Blessing Ehize, highlighted what he described as a major regulatory gap.

He stressed that a major point of friction was the perceived lack of direct regulatory engagement following the policy announcement.

Ehize disclosed that despite attempts to engage the regulator through groups such as the Committee of Bank CIOs, clarity remained elusive regarding what specific data must be stored on-premises and what could reside in hybrid cloud environments.

“Now, this is the problem. To bring payment data back on-premises, for the last three months, we have not been able to engage effectively with the Central Bank as the Committee of Bank CIOs to get clarity on these issues. I mean, you can ask; I am representing banks. From what I know, there’s not been a meeting held to say, ‘This is what it means’ in terms of clarity. So it is vague. You start thinking,

‘Are we really trying to play with the financial sector?’ This is where we need to start from: draw a roadmap. By this milestone, we should have done this. We really have the capacity to do this as a country, but we just need to plan it and not rush the Nigerian way,” he stated.

On his part, the Deputy Managing Director of eTranzact, Hakeem Adeniji-Adele, said the CBN had been engaging the fintech community.

“Maybe due to our sophistication and versatility, we have been engaged by the CBN. More discussions are still very much on,” he said.

Adeniji-Adele, however, flagged the six-month deadline, stressing that the period was too short, given the volume of data hosted in the cloud.

“I believe it is quite short, simply because of the amount of load that needs to be moved. I feel the solution should be a phased approach. Compute and storage should be divided into two, as opposed to telling everyone to move at once.

“Investors are asking everyone now, ‘Are you profitable?’ Those days of getting easy funding from Silicon Valley are gone. So we need to balance it. Can we phase the move? I don’t think six months is enough. If we phase it, some can move storage, and some can move compute,” Adeniji-Adele stressed.

Beyond regulatory guidance, industry leaders pointed to severe physical and technological bottlenecks.

Although Nigeria hosts a growing number of colocation facilities, questions remain over whether the country has enough high-specification, Tier-4 data centres capable of handling the massive enterprise and AI-driven computing workloads currently hosted on global cloud platforms such as AWS and Azure.

Speaking further, Adeniji-Adele emphasised that forcing companies, especially mid-sized operators, to move away from international cloud infrastructure within six months would impose a heavy financial burden at a time when global venture capital funding has cooled.

To avoid creating an isolated “digital island” or risking operational failures, both Adeniji-Adele and Ehize advocated a structured, multi-tier strategy.

They proposed:
Separation of compute and storage: Rather than demanding complete server migration at once, regulators should allow operators to phase the transition by separating data storage from computing workloads.

Building a data centre ecosystem: The government should adopt an intentional, partner-led approach, including establishing dedicated, tax-free data centre zones with guaranteed power infrastructure to encourage private investment.

Prioritising digital trust and interoperability: Data sovereignty should be balanced with global interoperability, ensuring that local infrastructure maintains international security standards and supports rapid incident response.

While stakeholders broadly agree on the long-term benefits of localising Nigeria’s estimated $1 billion annual cloud spending, they insist that building sustainable digital infrastructure requires realistic timelines, active regulatory dialogue and structural support.

On the readiness of the technology and data ecosystem to host data locally, the Chief Executive Officer of Open Access Data Centre (OADC), Dr Ayotunde Coker, advised banks to move quickly to assess the data they currently hold locally and internationally.