Technology
Innovative Digital Payment Solutions Will Deepen Cross-Border Trade—Interswitch
For several decades, the African continent has been bedevilled with low intra-trade volumes when compared to other parts of the world, and this has consequently hampered the growth of the African economy. To address this challenge, African countries came together to establish the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) to increase, strengthen and deepen intra-trade among African countries.
The establishment of the AfCFTA created the opportunity for a single market for the trade of goods and services on the continent, thereby increasing the level of intra-trade. The enactment of AfCFTA is expected to birth the largest free trade area in the world, measured by the number of countries participating, potentially connecting 1.3 billion people across 55 countries.
Financial experts believe that the establishment of AfCFTA has created a window of opportunities for financial institutions to close the gap between financially excluded persons and design cross-border financial products that will avail customers of seamless and safe financial services.
Consistent with its aspirations to build a prosperous African economy and make payment one less thing to worry about in Africa, Africa’s leading integrated payments and digital commerce company, Interswitch, has introduced a plethora of innovative products and solutions designed to transform the African economy as well as boost the continent’s digital payment ecosystem.
The firm made this known during its first breakfast session in Sierra Leone, where it hosted stakeholders and customers to a robust and insightful session designed to help Sierra Leonean businesses thrive. The firm organized the event to discuss how African businesses can leverage digital payments to unlock endless opportunities and drive growth in the financial industry.
Speaking at the breakfast session, Olubunmi Aina, Group Head Sales, Payment Processing and Switching (Interswitch Purepay), said the firm is committed to building a prosperous African economy by designing innovative cross-border payment products and solutions that will enable the growth of businesses in Sierra Leone and beyond.
He said, “For the last two decades, we have consistently designed products that address financial issues within the payment ecosystem. We equally have been facilitating payment, building infrastructure, and providing world-class technologies and support that aid financial institution to deliver top-notch services to their customers.
He further said, “We are here in Sierra Leone to replicate the successes we have attained in other parts of Africa by providing the Sierra Leone market with secure and safe digital payments products to further drive growth and profitability for businesses.”
Reiterating experts’ opinion that without a functional and effective payment system, Africa will not be able to facilitate international and regional trade, Interswitch introduced five products to the august audience at the breakfast session. The products; Postilion Retail Payment, Interswitch Banking-as-a- Service; Interswitch Payment-as-a-Service; Agency Banking and Card Fusion are designed to address prevailing issues within the ecosystem and offer; protection against digital payment fraud, effective value financing tools for lenders, seamless integration to newer payment channels and enhance business development.
While the products are targeted at commercial banks, microfinance banks, fintechs, other financial institutions, and their customers, they will essentially improve the digital payment solutions that financial institutions offer to their customers.
To demonstrate the ease of onboarding, participants at the session were onboarded onto the company’s products, thereby enabling them to rapidly integrate newer payment channels with intuitive and flexible technologies.
Beyond the benefits the products avail customers, the firm organised the breakfast session in Sierra Leone to bring key players in the financial industry together with the ultimate goal of deepening the growth of digital payment in the country.
Aina noted that Interswitch is committed to the advancement of digital payments in Africa and will continue to drive cross-border payments, financial inclusion and payment interoperability through its innovative products and solutions.
If Africa is to actualize the expected domestic e-payments revenue growth of about approximately 20 per cent per year, reaching around $40 billion by 2025, it is imperative that the players within the ecosystem advance digital payment on the continent and lower the cost of cross-border payments.
Interswitch, as Africa’s leading digital payment company, has taken on the challenge and is ensuring that critical markets across Africa, such as Sierra Leone, are provided with alternative payment methods with the introduction of its products. The technology company on the strength of its technical capabilities is providing payment infrastructure to financial institutions to reduce friction and boost integration. Its innovative products are ensuring that the rapidly evolving consumer payment needs are consistently met and even surpassed.
Interswitch is not just a proponent of seamless and convenient payment solutions; the firm has for 20 years consistently been leveraging technology to drive growth and prosperity for Africans across Africa.
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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