Technology
Strengthening Fintech Ecosystem through Partnerships
“Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.” This statement aptly describes the success achieved in the financial and payment landscape in Nigeria through the strategic partnership between fintechs and banks in the financial services industry.
Years ago, daring criminals would unleash mayhem on unsuspecting victims coming from banking halls and dispossess them of their valuables. This was because consumers had to move around with cash.
At the time, the majority of the people living in both urban and rural areas were unbanked and did not have access to financial products and services.
But as technology evolved and the digitalization of businesses became imperative to fit current realities, banks had to re-evaluate their service model and operational strategies. The need to transition into a digital wholesale banking system was inevitable.
The adoption of technology in service delivery such as banking, e-commerce, logistics etc. has contributed to the growth of fintech companies. With collaboration, fintechs have increasingly developed solutions that have been deployed across industries to enhance payment collection, efficiency and fund security. These partnerships between the fintechs and industry players have helped to accelerate product innovation, drive growth and provide top-notch solutions across the board.
The partnership between the fintech and the banking community has brought about innovative solutions such as funds transfer, on-demand bank statement, instant transaction alerts, payment authorization, loan request and disbursement, etc. Thanks to these innovative payment solutions, bank customers and account holders do not have to visit the banks often as they can initiate and complete transactions from the comfort of their homes.
Also, fintechs have leveraged partnerships with other service providers, such as power distribution companies (DISCOs), telecoms companies, ride-hailing services and utility companies to strengthen the payment ecosystem. These partnerships have further deepened financial inclusion and increased adoption of digital payment solutions, enhanced access to loans and other financial services such as funds transfer, bill payments, DSTV subscription, airtime recharge, and so on. These partnerships have helped the service providers collect payment seamlessly as well as allowing the customers to pay with ease.
Following these partnerships, Nigeria has witnessed an increase in the adoption of electronic payments over the last few years. Data shows the value of transactions via digital payment platforms, Nigeria Interbank Settlement System Instant Payment System (NIP) and Point of Sales (PoS) terminals rose to N60.34 trillion in the first quarter of 2021. That was a 12.55% increase when compared to the N53.61 trillion achieved in the fourth quarter of 2020.
Taking into cognizance that strategic partnerships help to strengthen payment solutions and are pivotal to economic growth, Africa’s leading digital payment and e-commerce company, Interswitch Group, has collaborated with several companies across industries to provide the broadest set of financial solutions to financial institutions across Africa.
Since its inception, Interswitch has been providing the switching infrastructure that connects different banks in Nigeria to reconcile inter-bank payments and settlements. Its solutions are also used to deliver the technology used for Automated Teller Machines (ATM) and PoS.
Following the acquisition of a minority stake by Visa in Interswitch in 2019, Interswitch is today the most valuable African Fintech business with a valuation in excess of $1 billion hence its recognition as a Unicorn. The partnership with Visa, allowed Fintech Unicorn to expand its digital payment solutions across the continent.
Beyond partnerships with brands, Interswitch has also partnered with governments across the continent to integrate its digital payment solutions to expand its inter-bank settlement capacities. These partnerships have enhanced the digital payment ecosystem, helped shape the much-needed financial transformation as well as boosted the African economy.
According to Tomi Ogunlesi, Group Head, Corporate Marketing, “Over the years, we have been making major strides in delivering world-class financial solutions to customers across the world. Through strategic partnerships, Interswitch has also reached major milestones and deepened access to financial services.”
In furtherance of its commitment to help strengthen the financial services industry, Interswitch recently revamped its developer console to improve the experiences of partners, developers and merchants who seek to integrate with their solutions.
Essentially, this platform enables developers to try out their products before going to the market. The new Interswitch APIs enable developers to create innovative tools and products and provides self-service integration, giving developers the ability to access Interswitch’s product APIs, authentication parameters, sandbox, production keys, documentation and seamless project management.
Indeed, the fusion between Fintechs, banks and other service providers as strategic partners would not only enable them to deliver satisfactory services to their numerous customers, it will help grow the payment ecosystem and also contribute immensely to the growth of the Nigerian economy.
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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