The Director-General and Chief Executive Officer of the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Kashifu Inuwa, has called on the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to shift its regulatory approach from merely digitising supervisory processes to achieving complete digital transformation.

Speaking at the CBN’s Committee of Departmental Directors’ Retreat, Inuwa stressed that while Nigeria has successfully built an extraordinary digital financial system, the rapid evolution of financial services demands an equally sophisticated and intelligent supervisory capability.

Reflecting on his former tenure at the Central Bank, the NITDA chief highlighted how banking had migrated from physical branches and standalone mobile apps to embedded, everyday customer experiences.

“Banking begins to disappear into the activity the customer is already performing,” Inuwa noted.

“The customer does not necessarily go banking. The customer wants to buy something… and the financial service increasingly appears inside that experience at the moment it is needed.”

He pointed out that Nigeria’s modern payment ecosystem now deeply connects traditional banks, fintechs, switches, cloud providers, telecommunications firms and shared national rails.

“Consequently, operational failures in non-bank entities outside the CBN’s direct perimeter can transmit risk directly into supervised institutions, requiring a fundamental update to the architecture of financial supervision.”

Drawing on framework models from MIT CISR, Inuwa made a clear distinction between being “digitised” — doing existing manual tasks faster through electronic forms or PDFs — and true “digital transformation”, which creates continuous institutional capacity for innovation.

He urged the Central Bank to transition from traditional retrospective supervision towards “intelligent supervision” built around five key capabilities: AI-assisted analysis, anomaly detection, graph and network analytics, early-warning systems, and AI-assisted horizon scanning.

Addressing operational risk, the NITDA boss urged regulators to view cybersecurity through the wider lens of “digital operational resilience”. While cybersecurity focuses on prevention, detection and response, operational resilience assumes prevention will eventually fail and focuses heavily on recovery and adaptation.

“Your customer does not experience your cybersecurity policy. Your customer experiences whether the payment works,” he said, advocating that resilience should be measured outward from the critical service itself.

Kashifu linked digital resilience directly to national digital sovereignty, defining it as the capacity for digital self-determination — building sufficient local infrastructure, skills, computing capacity and data governance capabilities while remaining open to global technology.

He commended the CBN’s alignment with national sovereign-cloud directives, which enforce local data-residency requirements for financial transaction data, calling it a prime example of regulatory complementarity.

Summarising his address, Inuwa presented three core propositions to the committee of directors: ecosystem visibility, digital transformation, and resilience and sovereignty.

“The opportunity before us now is to build a supervisory capability worthy of our financial system — one that can see it, understand it, anticipate its risks and protect its resilience.”