Technology
Collaboration and Investment Key to Strengthening Africa’s Digital Payments Cybersecurity
By Omotayo Ogunlade
As the digital payments landscape in Africa expands, the need for robust cybersecurity measures becomes increasingly urgent. Trust and security are foundational to financial services, and as cybercriminals continue to become more aggressive and sophisticated, addressing any vulnerabilities is key to safeguarding the integrity of Africa’s digital financial ecosystem. In fact, Africa experienced the highest average number of cyberattacks per week per organisation in 2023 with a 23% increase compared to the previous year.
Africa’s digital financial ecosystem is still maturing, and as digital payments become more integrated across countries, and regions, and more interoperable across payment platforms, this increasingly complex environment can introduce new cybersecurity vulnerabilities.
And, as in an interconnected landscape, a single weak link can jeopardise the entire network, the continent’s financial institutions, governments and decision-makers must come together to collectively work towards establishing and maintaining baseline security standards across the industry. This requires building meaningful partnerships with relevant stakeholders, substantial investment and greater harmonisation of regulations and policies across the continent.
The imperative for investment and standardised regulations
Several challenges hinder the attainment of robust cybersecurity in Africa. One of the primary issues is the lag in regulatory frameworks, while a lack of significant investment in security would lead to vulnerabilities within the continent’s financial sector being exploited.
Fortunately, investment in cybersecurity has seen a notable increase over the past five years, reflecting a growing recognition of its importance. The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and sophisticated cyber threats has driven firms to allocate more resources towards cybersecurity. And digital payment networks like Onafriq have strengthened their security posture by investing in intelligent tools that predict and proactively address potential threats.
Despite these advancements, there remains a disparity in investment levels across the continent. Ensuring that all financial institutions can meet necessary security standards requires coordinated efforts and substantial capital. This includes investing in state-of-the-art technology and continuous monitoring systems to detect and prevent malicious activities.
Additionally, regulators play a crucial role in setting and enforcing security standards. And yet the pace of regulatory development often falls behind the speed of innovation in the fintech space. Harmonising regulations across different African countries is essential to create a consistent and secure environment for digital payments by adopting best practices and global standards. This is necessary to avoid fragmentation of the digital payments landscape while effective enforcement of these standards is vital to maintaining a secure financial ecosystem.
A need for cybersecurity skills and a security-first culture
A truly secure payment environment requires buy-in from every part of the ecosystem’s value chain, including the end user. Not only must financial institutions adopt a security-first approach, embedding robust security measures into every aspect of their operations, but educating users about security practices is just as crucial.
As digital payments become more prevalent, financial institutions must design products with built-in security features and continuously educate users on safe practices. This includes secure PIN usage, recognizing phishing attempts, and safeguarding personal information.
For example, Onafriq exemplifies this approach by ensuring that security is a priority from the design stage. By securing networks, protecting sensitive data, and conducting regular third-party audits, we have been able to maintain a strong security record. This proactive stance is essential for preventing breaches and ensuring customer trust.
More than this, there is a growing need to build the cybersecurity capacity needed to sustain the digital payments landscape. Africa faces a shortage of skilled cybersecurity professionals, which hampers the ability to address emerging threats effectively. A cybersecurity assessment conducted by the African Union Commission and the United Nations Development Programme found that African countries had a cybersecurity competence of 0.21 out of 1 with more than 70% of African nations requiring additional cybersecurity infrastructure.
Financial institutions and governments must invest in training programs, internships, and continuous education to develop a skilled workforce capable of managing cybersecurity challenges. But, retaining talent within Africa also remains a significant issue. Many trained professionals seek opportunities abroad, exacerbating the skills gap. Addressing this requires creating conducive environments that offer competitive opportunities and career growth within the continent.
Cybersecurity is a cornerstone of Africa’s digital payments landscape. To achieve a secure and resilient financial sector, Africa must invest in robust cybersecurity infrastructure, foster regulatory harmonisation, and prioritise collaborative efforts among financial institutions. By addressing these challenges, Africa can build a secure digital payments ecosystem that supports economic growth and instils trust among users.
Omotayo Ogunlade is the Chief Technology Officer at Onafriq
By Adedapo Adesanya
Lagos State’s representative, Team Nevo, won the 3 Million Technical Talent (3MTT) South-West Regional Hackathon, on Tuesday, December 9, 2025.
The host state took the victory defeating pitches from other south west states, including Oyo, Ogun, Osun, Ekiti, and Ondo States.
This regional hackathon was a major moment for the 3MTT Programme, bringing together young innovators from across the South-West to showcase practical solutions in AI, software development, cybersecurity, data analysis, and other key areas of Nigeria’s digital future.
Launched by the Federal Ministry of Communications, Innovation, and Digital Economy, the hackathon brought together talented young innovators from across the Southwest region to showcase their digital solutions in areas such as Artificial Intelligence (AI)/Machine Learning, software development, data analysis, and cybersecurity, among others.
“This event not only highlights the potential of youth in South West but also advances the digital economy, fosters innovation, and creates job opportunities for our young people,” said Mr Oluwaseyi Ayodele, the Lagos State Community Manager.
Winning the hackaton was Team Nevo, made up of Miss Lydia Solomon and Mr Teslim Sadiq, whose inclusive AI learning tool which tailors academic learning experiences to skill sets of students got the top nod, with N500,000 in prize money.
Team Oyo represented by Microbiz, an AI business tool solution, came in second place winning N300,000 while Team Ondo’s Fincoach, a tool that guides individuals and businesses in marking smarter financial decisions, came third with N200,000 in prize money.
Others include The Frontiers (Team Osun), Ecocycle (Team Ogun), and Mindbud (Team Ekiti).
Speaking to Business Post, the lead pitcher for Team Nevo, Miss Solomon, noted, “It was a very lovely experience and the opportunity and access that we got was one of a kind,” adding that, “Expect the ‘Nevolution’ as we call it, expect the transformation of the educational sector and how Nevo is going to bring inclusion and a deeper level of understanding and learning to schools all around Nigeria.”
Earlier, during his keynote speech, the chief executive officer (CEO) of Sterling Bank, Mr Abubakar Suleiman, emphasised the need for Nigeria’s budding youth population to tap into the country’s best comparative advantage, drawing parallels with commodities and resources like cocoa, soyabeans, and uranium.
“Tech is our best bet to architect a comparative advantage. The work we are doing with technologies are very vital to levelling the playing field.”
By Aduragbemi Omiyale
One of the high points of the 2025 re:Invent was the unveiling of Graviton5, the fifth generation of custom Arm-based server processors from Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Many tech enthusiasts believe that the company pushed the limits with Graviton5, its most powerful and efficient CPU, frontier agents that can work autonomously for days, an expansion of the Amazon Nova model family, Trainium3 UltraServers, and AWS AI Factories suitable for implementing AI infrastructure in customers’ existing data centres.
Graviton5—the company’s most powerful and efficient CPU
As cloud workloads grow in complexity, organizations face a persistent challenge to deliver faster performance at lower costs and meet sustainability commitments without trade-offs.
AWS’ new Graviton5-based Amazon EC2 M9g delivers up to 25% higher performance than its previous generation, with 192 cores per chip and 5x larger cache.
For the third year in a row, more than half of new CPU capacity added to AWS is powered by Graviton, with 98 per cent of the top 1,000 EC2 customers—including Adobe, Airbnb, Epic Games, Formula 1, Pinterest, SAP, and Siemens—already benefiting from Graviton’s price performance advantages.
Expansion of Nova family of models and pioneers “open training” with Nova Forge
Amazon is expanding its Nova portfolio with four new models that deliver industry-leading price-performance across reasoning, multimodal processing, conversational AI, code generation, and agentic tasks. Nova Forge pioneers “open training,” giving organizations access to pre-trained model checkpoints and the ability to blend proprietary data with Amazon Nova-curated datasets.
Nova Act achieves breakthrough 90% reliability for browser-based UI automation workflows built by early customers. Companies like Reddit are using Nova Forge to replace multiple specialized models with a single solution, while Hertz accelerated development velocity by 5x with Nova Act.
Addition of 3 frontier agents, a new class of AI agents that work as an extension of your software development team
Frontier agents represent a step-change in what agents can do. They’re autonomous, scalable, and can work for hours or days without intervention. AWS announced three frontier agents—Kiro autonomous agent, AWS Security Agent, and AWS DevOps Agent. Kiro autonomous agent acts as a virtual developer for your team, AWS Security Agent is your own security consultant, and AWS DevOps Agent is your on-call operational team.
Companies, including Commonwealth Bank of Australia, SmugMug, and Wester Governors University have used one or more of these agents to transform the software development lifecycle.
Unveiling Trainium3 UltraServers
As AI models grow in size and complexity, training cutting-edge models requires infrastructure investments that only a handful of organizations can afford.
Amazon EC2 Trn3 UltraServers, powered by AWS’s first 3nm AI chip, pack up to 144 Trainium3 chips into a single integrated system, delivering up to 4.4x more compute performance and 4x greater energy efficiency than Trainium2 UltraServers.
Customers achieve 3x higher throughput per chip while delivering 4x faster response times, reducing training times from months to weeks. Customers including Anthropic, Karakuri, Metagenomi, NetoAI, Ricoh, and Splash Music are reducing training and inference costs by up to 50 per cent with Trainium, while Decart is achieving 4x faster inference for real-time generative video at half the cost of GPUs, and Amazon Bedrock is already serving production workloads on Trainium3.
By Adedapo Adesanya
The National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) has issued an advisory on new vulnerabilities in ChatGPT that could expose users to data-leakage attacks.
According to the advisory, researchers discovered seven vulnerabilities affecting GPT-4o and GPT-5 models that allow attackers to manipulate ChatGPT through indirect prompt injection.
The agency explained that hidden instructions placed inside webpages, comments, or Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) can trigger unintended commands during regular browsing, summarisation, or search actions.
“By embedding hidden instructions in webpages, comments, or crafted URLs, attackers can cause ChatGPT to execute unintended commands simply through normal browsing, summarization, or search actions,” they stated.
The warning followed rising concerns about AI-powered tools interacting with unsafe web content and the growing dependence on ChatGPT for business, research, and public-sector tasks.
NITDA added that some flaws allow the bypassing of safety controls by masking malicious content behind trusted domains.
Other weaknesses take advantage of markdown rendering bugs, enabling hidden instructions to pass undetected.
It explained that in severe cases, attackers can poison ChatGPT’s memory, forcing the system to retain malicious instructions that influence future conversations
They stated that while OpenAI has fixed parts of the issue, Large-Language Models (LLMs) still struggle to reliably separate genuine user intent from malicious data.
The Agency warned that these vulnerabilities could lead to a range of cybersecurity threats, including unauthorised actions carried out by the model; unintended exposure of user information; manipulated or misleading outputs; and long-term behavioural changes caused by memory poisoning, among others.
It advised Nigerians, businesses, and government institutions to adopt several precautionary steps to stay safe. These include limiting or disabling the browsing and summarisation of untrusted websites within enterprise environments and enabling features like browsing or memory only when necessary.
It also recommended regular updates to deployed GPT-4o and GPT-5 models to ensure known vulnerabilities are patched.
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