The new CBN directive mandates that local transaction data, payment records, customer financial information, and core banking operations must reside within Nigeria’s borders. Institutions that fail to comply face regulatory enforcement, penalties, and licence risk. The question is no longer whether to move, but how and how fast.

The challenge is that most Nigerian financial institutions are deeply embedded in foreign cloud infrastructure. Their applications, data pipelines, security frameworks, and disaster recovery protocols were all designed and optimised for these large global cloud environments.

Migrating critical workloads to domestic infrastructure is not a simple copy-and-paste exercise; rather, it requires re-architecting for a new environment, testing performance parity, and ensuring security equivalence. Doing all of this in six months while running a live banking operation is a feat of engineering and project management that few institutions are fully prepared for.

Infrastructure providers like MTN are investing heavily in domestic capacity, signalling that the gap between local and foreign clouds is narrowing. For compliance-regulated workloads, domestic infrastructure is no longer just a fallback but a rational choice, leaving CIOs to determine which provider can best handle tier-1 workloads. That evaluation is where the real difficulty lies because vendor sales pitches are abundant but inherently biased, and industry conferences are often public and postured.

What decision-makers need is independent, technically rigorous guidance on how to think about the problem. They must understand what the CBN framework requires in architectural terms, how to model the total cost of ownership when comparing providers, and what a phased migration looks like for a live banking environment. These are the questions that must be answered through industry-wide collaboration rather than individual vendor interests.

While significant investments in domestic infrastructure now offer the capacity to meet the demands of Nigeria’s financial sector, the compliance journey remains a systemic challenge that transcends the capabilities of any single provider.

The January 2027 deadline is real. It is enforceable, and the institutions that delay will find themselves in a compliance crisis, not a competitive one. The institutions that act now, starting with beginning their gap assessments, their vendor evaluations, and piloting their migrations, will not only meet the deadline. They will emerge stronger, with infrastructure that is closer to their customers, subject to Nigerian jurisdiction, and aligned with the strategic direction of the economy.

By Kehinde Ogundare

If you were to step away from your business for 30 days, what would happen? Would it continue to grow, remain stable, or begin to decline?

For many founders, answering this question honestly reveals an uncomfortable truth: something would inevitably slow down. This is often because the business depends too heavily on the founder’s memory, personal relationships, and a flurry of WhatsApp messages. This is a ‘structure’ problem.

Nigeria has produced some of the world’s most resilient entrepreneurs. They have built customer bases amid infrastructure constraints, navigated economic uncertainty, and generated revenue in highly competitive markets. However, survival and scale are fundamentally different challenges. The skills required to take a business from an idea to initial traction are not the same as those needed to achieve sustainable growth. Put simply, hustle may launch a business, but structure is what allows it to scale.

The systems supporting growth

Many Nigerian businesses’ growth is constrained by operational inefficiencies, fragmented information, and an absence of repeatable processes.

When critical information exists only in someone’s memory, customer relationships are managed through individual conversations, decisions are based on incomplete records, and the organisation becomes vulnerable. It may continue operating, but its ability to scale predictably will remain limited.

Having worked with businesses across Nigeria, a clear pattern has emerged. The companies that scale successfully are not necessarily the most funded, nor are they simply the most talented. They are often the ones with the clearest structures. To transition from mere survival to becoming truly formidable, leaders must embrace five fundamental operating shifts. These are profound changes in operating philosophy:

1. From memory to system: “Don’t worry, I know that customer” can become one of the most dangerous phrases in a growing enterprise. When a key individual leaves, the relationship often departs with them. Businesses must move from ad hoc recall to permanent systems where every conversation and preference is captured and searchable. The system must remember so the founder can simply decide.

2. From gut feeling to data: Decisions made purely on intuition are made without the complete picture. Formidable businesses replace gut feelings with measurable insights, utilising real-time dashboards to turn reactive guesses into proactive strategies. The absence of data costs money.

3. From relationships to intelligence: In Nigeria’s business culture, trust is foundational, but the highest level of operation combines relationship warmth with data precision. By turning personal ties into scalable knowledge, businesses can anticipate customer needs and identify early churn signals, amplifying the human element rather than replacing it.

4. From chasing to managing revenue: Hoping for a good month or saying “we’re talking to a few people” are hopes, not indicators. Businesses must shift from reactively chasing revenue to proactively managing it through disciplined pipelines, forecasting, and accountability.

5. From silos to connected touchpoints: When sales, finance, customer service, and operations exist in isolation, the customer feels it. A customer should experience one cohesive business, not five disjointed departments. A unified architecture ensures that every touchpoint is connected and measurable.

In the end, just as every device relies on an operating system, your business requires one, too. Operating with a fragmented approach is no longer sustainable. Every enterprise should strive to connect with platforms that deliver a unified architecture, seamlessly integrating customer, financial, operational, and personal data to build the vital infrastructure necessary for modern market realities.

Nigeria’s digital economy is projected to reach $18.3 billion by 2026. Structure will determine which businesses capture this opportunity. The next economic phase will not be won by the businesses that hustle the hardest but by those that have built the architecture to sustain the race. Formidable is not a size; it is a structure, and you can start building it today.

Kehinde Ogundare is the Regional Head of West Africa at Zoho Corporation

By Shmuel Ja’Mba Abm

In a report filed by The Business Standard on August 8, 2026, India, the current BRICS chair, opposes a proposal for a common currency to counter the US dollar.

The Indian Commerce Minister, Piyush Goyal, told reporters in Jaipur, Rajasthan, northwestern India, after a two-day BRICS trade and industry meeting, that India was not in favour of a BRICS currency. He added that India did not support the introduction of any such BRICS currency scheme.

It is good these things are showing signs at this early stage of attempts by BRICS member countries to crystallise a research finding published by a British economist at Goldman Sachs, Jim O’Neil, in 2001.

None of the leaders and country members of BRICS ever conceived on record the formation of such an economic or political bloc until the research publication, which spurred leaders of the mentioned countries to marshal resources and begin a dialogue of formalisation.

The current membership that started involuntarily with just Brazil, Russia, India, and China as a concept published by a research economist, that later included South Africa, now has 10 members – Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, United Arab Emirates, and Indonesia.

Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Thailand, Uganda, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam are designated partner countries that participate in framework meetings without full voting rights.

Originally, the publication by Jim O’Neil wasn’t intended or proposed as a vehicle for the political grouping that has drawn the attention of the rest of the world, as mentioned members took a step further from the appraisal or assessment paper to coalesce into a political force overflowing its original boundaries today.

For the above reasons, the initial step of early contacts was to take advantage of things in common in member countries for the stimulation of economic growth and global prosperity. At that stage, suspicions were managed, and plans didn’t consider historical political differences and disagreements as grounds for suspicion or discontinuation of cooperation.

Of course, China and India had trust issues over decades of border disputes. And in the early stages of heightened escalations of the Russian-Ukrainian relationship when India offered to mediate and broker for ceasefire and eventual peace, Russia wasn’t sceptical but took steps to host the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi.

But at the back of the mind of the Russian-Indian relationship, history was revealing about betrayals, especially after what the country endured in assassinations of leading members of the Indian National Congress, that killed Indira Gandhi and swept her son, Rajiv Gandhi, and thereafter ravaged the family dynasty with threats of violence.

These paved the way for the emergence of the Bharatiya Janata Party, a Hindu nationalist party, and its leader, Narendra Modi. The BJP is not directly responsible for the intimidation and violent campaign against the INC, a close former Soviet-era ally of Russia, but a beneficiary. There are grounds to suspect a frosty relationship with Russia, although concealed in diplomatic niceties and global market dynamics of cross-border business and trade.

India turned into the redistribution hub of Russian discounted grains and oil supplies as a third country, after sanctions were imposed on Russia in what Russia described as demilitarisation and denazification special operations in Ukraine.

India is considered by Western powers as a democracy. It was once a British colony, gaining independence on August 15, 1947. It is also a member of the British Commonwealth of Nations. On a normal day, it doesn’t add or take away anything. But under these circumstances, these are serious factors to consider in arriving at a decision.

Be it as it may, China and Russia have found their way out in world trade, bypassing SWIFT. China operates the Cross-border Inter-bank Payment System, whilst Russia is running the System for Transfer of Financial Messages (SPFS). India has IMPS and NEFT. In principle, these payment systems bypass SWIFT and the US dollar, nonetheless.

As the world waits to hear India back its dissenting views with supporting facts, world trade will never remain the same again.

Shmuel Ja’Mba Abm has extensive scholarly publications that establish him as a leading academic expert in regional geopolitical dynamics and diplomatic relations in Africa. Author of e-monographs on geopolitics, ethnic conflicts, and political philosophy.