This discussion has gathered pace since the CBN directed banks, fintechs and other financial institutions to store payment data in Nigeria by January 2027.

The policy aims to improve oversight and ensure sensitive financial information remains under Nigerian jurisdiction.

While founders say they understand the push for stronger oversight and data sovereignty, many are also asking whether the country’s digital infrastructure is ready for such a transition.

Chibueze Damian, founder and CEO, Paymita, said his first reaction was concern.

“While I understand the objective of improving data sovereignty and regulatory oversight, Nigeria’s data centre ecosystem is still not there yet and also it is still developing and may not yet offer the same scale, reliability, redundancy, and cost efficiency available in some global cloud environments.”

Damian said infrastructure reliability is very critical for fintech businesses whose services depend on uninterrupted operations.

“Any policy that limits infrastructure choices without equivalent local alternatives could increase costs and operational risks.”

Still, he believes the CBN directive for data localisation could provide long-term benefits if it attracts sustained investment into Nigeria’s digital infrastructure.

“At the same time, I see the policy as an opportunity to bring in investment in Nigeria’s digital infrastructure over the long term.”

Roosevelt Elias, founder and CEO of Payble, views the directive differently. In his opinion, the CBN is not introducing a new policy but enforcing a direction it has signalled for years.

“This is not new policy. The CBN has signalled data localisation intent for years. What this circular does is put a deadline behind it, and that is the right move. A regulator that issues a directive and actually enforces it is better for the sector than one that files its own circulars away and moves on.”

He believes the conversation goes beyond data sovereignty and touches the structure of Nigeria’s digital economy.

“Nigeria loses an estimated $850 million annually in cloud revenue to foreign providers. That money funds data centres in Ireland and Virginia, not Lagos.”

Damian said regulators are ultimately aiming for stronger data security, regulatory access and better control over sensitive payment information. However, he stressed that local infrastructure must be able to meet the demands of fast-growing fintech companies if the policy is to achieve its goals.

He expects the first impact to be felt in infrastructure planning and compliance spending.

“Fintechs may need to review their hosting arrangements, data architecture, and partnerships to ensure compliance with the directive.”

Roosevelt also pointed to the fact that one of the biggest weaknesses in Nigeria’s payments ecosystem is not fraud but fragmented transaction records spread across different systems.

“A significant share of transaction data in Nigeria sits across fragmented processors and poorly reconciled systems. That makes it nearly impossible to detect systemic risk before it builds.”

The result, he said, is that many businesses process significant transaction volumes but remain invisible to lenders.

“The most consistent pattern I see is businesses doing real transaction volume with no credit identity, not because they are not creditworthy, but because their financial history never cohered into something a bank could read or act on.”

While he considers the CBN data localisation policy an important step, he cautioned that location alone will not solve every problem.

“The directive does not mandate standardised data formats or API-level regulatory access, and those things matter as much as geography.”

On the issue of compliance, both founders expect additional costs. Damian believes fintech firms will need to reassess their hosting arrangements and data architecture before the deadline arrives.

Roosevelt said the migration itself is manageable because domestic data centre providers already operate in Nigeria and additional capacity is being developed. His bigger concern is the recurring compliance burden that follows.

“The harder cost is the one that does not appear in any infrastructure budget: the compliance audit trail.”

He said ongoing security certification and audit requirements could become a permanent operational expense, especially for smaller operators without dedicated compliance teams.

Despite their concerns, both founders believe the directive could strengthen Nigeria’s fintech ecosystem if infrastructure investment keeps pace with regulation.

“I believe it can strengthen the ecosystem in the long term if accompanied by significant investment in local data centre capacity and reliability,” Damian said.

“Without that support, smaller startups may face higher costs and operational challenges that could slow innovation and growth in Nigeria fintech space.”

For Roosevelt, the biggest test electricity supply and operating conditions for data centres.

“The risk is on the power side. Nigerian data centres currently run diesel backup that can account for up to 40% of operating costs.”

He believes the next two years will determine whether the policy delivers lasting infrastructure improvements or simply increases costs for operators.

With the January 2027 deadline in sight, financial institutions are beginning to prepare for payment data to remain within Nigeria’s borders, but then, the infrastructure needed to support that purpose should be made ready in time.

The post Fintech Founders Welcome CBN’s Data Localisation Order but Worry about Execution Costs appeared first on Tech | Business | Economy.

Around 100 users were affected, with some reporting unauthorised transactions. Passwords were reset, credit monitoring was provided and the company said the issue, linked to part of its Working Capital product, had been active between July and December 2025 before it was discovered and corrected.

This appears small, as the platform did not shut down and markets did not panic. But I believe the big issue sits elsewhere.

The incident exposes a structural weakness in the cashless economy, a system that depends entirely on digital trust, centralised platforms and uninterrupted code.

The Cashless System Has No Shock Absorber

Cash absorbs failure. If one bank’s card network glitches, cash still works. If a payment processor has downtime, physical notes settle transactions. But with economies moving further into digital-only rails, that shock absorber disappears.

Digital payments now account for the overwhelming majority of retail transactions in advanced economies. In the United Kingdom, debit and credit cards represent more than 85% of consumer payments.

Globally, non-cash transactions have been growing at double-digit annual rates. Emerging markets are scaling even faster as mobile wallets replace traditional banking.

Efficiency has improved, friction has reduced, but resilience has become more fragile.

When money exists as code, failure is binary. Either the system works, or it does not.

Concentration Risk Is Growing

The global cashless economy runs through a small number of dominant platforms. PayPal reports over 400 million active accounts worldwide and processes more than a trillion dollars in annual payment volume.

Add card networks, digital wallets and online gateways, and you have a tightly interconnected ecosystem.

This concentration creates scale and convenience, but also creates single points of failure.

If a major payments node is compromised, whether through a coding flaw, cyberattack or infrastructure outage, disruption spreads quickly. Merchants cannot settle.

Refund cycles stall, subscription services fail, cross-border transfers are delayed, and small businesses feel it first because they rely heavily on digital rails for liquidity.

The PayPal exposure did not escalate to that scale. But it revealed how long a vulnerability can remain embedded inside a critical platform before detection. Five months is not a short time in financial systems.

In a cashless economy, detection lag is systemic risk.

Digital Trust Is Not Infinite

Consumers rarely abandon platforms after breaches. Behavioural data shows that convenience and network effects usually outweigh fear. But trust weakens gradually. It does not collapse overnight. It erodes.

In a system without physical alternatives, confidence is everything. If users begin to question whether their data or funds are secure, their behaviour changes subtly. They diversify platforms, withdraw balances faster and hesitate on large transactions.

Trust underpins liquidity.

And liquidity underpins financial stability.

The Illusion of Seamless Security

The digital economy creates an illusion of precision and control. Transactions settle in seconds. Fraud detection algorithms flag anomalies instantly. Authentication systems appear sophisticated.

However, the PayPal incident was not a sophisticated nation-state attack. It was reportedly a coding error inside an interface. That shows vulnerability does not always come from external hackers. It can originate internally, through routine development processes.

Platforms are scaling, codebases expanding, integrations multiplying and third-party dependencies increasing, but complexity is growing faster than oversight.

The more seamless digital finance appears on the surface, the more complex and layered it becomes underneath.

Complex systems fail in unexpected ways.

Systemic Risk Has Shifted Shape

Traditional financial crises were driven by credit excess, leverage and liquidity mismatches. Today, systemic risk has evolved. Operational fragility is growing alongside digital dependence.

International regulators have already flagged cyber threats as one of the top risks to financial stability. The concern is not just theft, it is service disruption and cascading effects across interconnected systems.

In a cashless economy, payment platforms are not peripheral but infrastructure.

If infrastructure weakens, confidence weakens. If confidence weakens, economic activity slows.

Regulatory Convergence Is Inevitable

Fintech once operated in a lighter regulatory environment compared to banks. That gap is narrowing and incidents like this strengthen the case for tougher operational resilience standards.

Expect stronger audits, faster disclosure requirements and possibly mandatory cyber stress testing for major platforms. If digital payments are essential to economic function, they will be supervised like essential utilities.

Is fintech innovative? Yes! But is it resilient?

What Breaks Next?

The cashless economy seeks efficiency, transparency and speed. It does well in all three, but it also concentrates risk inside digital architecture that most users never see.

The PayPal incident is not an isolated lapse but a signal. When vulnerabilities continue inside core payment systems for months, even at small scale, it forces a big thought.

Have we prioritised growth over durability?

The structural weakness in the cashless economy is not fraud but dependence. Dependence on uninterrupted code, concentrated platforms and continuous connectivity.

If one payment platform fails briefly, inconvenience follows. If several fail simultaneously, confidence follows. And in finance, confidence is the system.

The post The PayPal Incident Proves Digital Finance is More Vulnerable Than We Admit appeared first on Tech | Business | Economy.

The upgrade, dubbed Fintech 2.0, moves Africa’s second-largest mobile money service to a cloud-native architecture, allowing it to process 6,000 transactions per second at launch, with the potential to double as demand rises.

“The scheduled M-PESA upgrade was successfully completed and all services fully restored. All M-PESA services are now available. We look forward to serving you better and providing you with seamless experiences,” the telco said in a tweet.

The migration addresses long-standing limitations. The previous system, operating near a 4,500-transactions-per-second ceiling, left little room for growth. Fintech 2.0 leverages microservices hosted on Huawei Cloud, enabling Safaricom to update individual components without taking the platform offline, a major step for reliability and speed.

Sources familiar with operations say engineers are monitoring live transactions to detect irregularities, a process expected to last several days. Other insiders indicate that the operator now aims to accelerate integrations with banks, fintechs, and developers, opening the door for new APIs, merchant credit products, and cross-border payment solutions.

M-PESA handles more than 21 billion transactions annually, serving over 50 million users across Africa, including payments, remittances, credit, and e-commerce. The upgrade is expected to strengthen its operations as a regional financial backbone, particularly for small businesses and cross-border trade, aligning with goals under the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA).

Competition is getting higher. Airtel Money and other digital-first fintechs have steadily expanded, putting pressure on M-PESA’s top place. The upgrade is not just a technical improvement, but aims to maintain leadership across the market.

In modernising its infrastructure, Safaricom positions M-PESA as a more agile, scalable, and partner-friendly platform. This change reflects the vision first backed by late CEO Bob Collymore, who framed the company’s future as a platform play rather than a closed service. 

With digital payments growing ever more competitive, Fintech 2.0 could enhance mobile money in Africa.

The post Fintech 2.0: Safaricom M-PESA Upgrade Boosts Mobile Money Performance Across Africa appeared first on Tech | Business | Economy.

In its latest round, PayTic raised $4.4 million in fresh funding to deepen its operations in the Middle East and Africa. 

AfricInvest led the round, joined by Axian Venture Lab and Mistral VC. Existing backers like CDG Invest, BVC, Concrete VC, and ICP Ventures also returned. This brings the company’s total funding to $7.4 million.

Founded in Casablanca in 2020 by Imad Bouhmadi, PayTic was built not to impress consumers, but to rescue banks, fintechs, and card issuers from the chaos of their own operations.

While many startups focus on the front-end user experience, PayTic goes where the real problems live—in the backend, where reconciliation, chargebacks, fraud checks, and compliance live and breathe.

Bouhmadi calls it “the operational aftermath of payments.”

This isn’t a space most people want to think about. But for institutions juggling multiple card programmes, payment rails, and regulatory obligations, it’s hell. PayTic’s solution? An end-to-end platform that doesn’t just integrate with existing systems—it practically replaces the manual processes still plaguing the industry. And it doesn’t need code to do it.

“The problem we’re solving is largely invisible to consumers but mission-critical for fintechs, banks, and card issuers,” Bouhmadi said. “We’ve built a no-code operating system for payment operations.”

That system gives clients a clean dashboard to handle everything from line-by-line invoice analysis to auto-generated BIN sponsor invoices. It’s not classy, but it’s transformative. Tasks that once took hours or even days can be done in minutes—with far less human error.

Unlike competitors like UK-based Kani Payments, which zeroes in on reconciliation alone, PayTic is gunning for full spectrum dominance. “They focus on one piece of the process,” Bouhmadi said. “We’ve built an end-to-end solution that’s integration-free, no-code, and instantly usable across the operational spectrum.”

Right now, PayTic works with more than 20 institutions spread across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Some names include Morocco’s CIH Bank, CFG Bank, and BNI Madagascar. OGS, the processing engine behind Bank of Africa, is also on that list. It’s also in talks with players in Nigeria, a market Bouhmadi calls “one of the most exciting fintech ecosystems on the continent.”

The revenue model is a mix of SaaS subscription fees, volume-based pricing, and revenue-sharing agreements. It’s flexible, which makes sense for a tool designed to untangle complexity.

Is the market big enough? It’s bigger than it looks. With Africa’s payments sector becoming more layered, the old ways of doing things simply don’t scale. Without operational automation, banks and fintechs risk drowning in their own data and red tape.

PayTic sees this—and it’s betting the future of finance lies not in the user interface, but in the machinery underneath it.

This funding is not just about growth. It’s about leverage—getting the product into more hands, building stronger partnerships, and pushing further into underserved regions. Bouhmadi said, “We view PayTic as a key enabler to our ability to grow our business. As we add more card programs, we will be sure to have PayTic there to help us manage the back-office program functions.”

It’s an unglamorous mission. But if PayTic delivers, it could become the quiet innovation behind the working African and Middle Eastern financial infrastructure.

The post PayTic Raises $4.4m to Fix the Broken Backbone of Payment Systems appeared first on Tech | Business | Economy.

Teceonomy gathered that the aqusition is in a move that will benefit both business’s customers and support Ecentric’s strategy to become the dominant omnichannel player for retailers with a national footprint.

Ecentric is already known for its best-of-breed technology for what is traditionally known as Tier one enterprise customers.

It processes 20% of South Africa’s card transactions and serves as a trusted payments partner to 65% of the JSE-listed retailers, serving their in-store, online, mobile and omnichannel payments requirements.

Its acquisition of Thumbzup’s IP will see it make a significant play into the broader retail sector, reaching more national retailers in the tier two retail sector, while being a trusted partner to service providers supporting SMME’s.

Ecentric CEO Hassen Sheik says that besides a perfect cultural fit around customer centricity and innovation, the deal made sense from the growth perspective.

“Ecentric is expanding locally and across Africa, and we realise that just like enterprise, more national retailers are crucial to this growth. We appreciated that to support this growth we need to have an accompanying in-store physical capability. In other words, we must be able to supply physical integration of point-of-sale devices and technology in store, which we haven’t traditionally done outside of enterprise,” he says.

Sheik adds: “We now have devices, payment software, terminal management systems, and other value-added services that we think will resonate across more national retailers, which is a natural string to our bow alongside our current product set. Besides the added reach, the deal underpins our omnichannel, fully reconciled proposition to the market. There was a beautiful synergy between what they have been doing and where we are going.”

The added competency in Ecentric now gives new customers the opportunity to deal with one service provider across all their payment requirements, both instore and online, with a single reconciliation in the back office, while the added features also allow Ecentric to augment its current customers’ offerings.

Along with the IP, devices and technology stack, Thumbzup’s team is being fully integrated into the Ecentric business. “The technical development capability that the team brings to our business means that time-to-market from a customer point of view is radically shortened. The staff we acquired are highly advanced at integrating till software with payment devices, drastically reducing the time spent on implementations,” says Sheik.

Beyond this, Sheik says that there are currently unannounced developments that the former Thumbzup – now Ecentric – team have been busy developing which will enable Ecentric to reach POS partners for integration across many retailers.

Another tactical shift enabled by the deal is the ability to actively participate with best-of-breed Android payment capabilities. “With this deal we don’t just have access to the last mile, but also many more android devices. With the advent of Android in the payment device world, we see much more flexibility and greater agility to bring on services beyond payments. This deal allows us to participate strongly and directly with some of the best android capabilities in the market,” explains Sheik.

He says the acquisition was a natural step as it is aligned with the Ecentric strategy. “We want to be the pre-eminent service provider to retail, supporting their consumers and the way they pay wherever they work, play or live. The skills and IP we have onboarded and integrated into our business with this deal opens these doors for Ecentric, while providing a compelling proposition for customers.”

The post Ecentric Payment Systems Acquires IP of Payment Industry Innovator Thumbzup appeared first on Tech | Business | Economy.