Interswitch Highlights Infrastructure, Resilience Needs for Nigeria’s Data Localisation Mandate

 Interswitch Highlights Infrastructure, Resilience Needs for Nigeria’s Data Localisation Mandate

Interswitch has called for stronger investment in local power, connectivity and disaster recovery infrastructure to ensure the seamless implementation of Nigeria’s data localisation requirements in the financial technology sector.

The company’s Executive Vice President, Operations and Technology, Babafemi Ogungbamila, made the call while speaking at TechCabal’s exclusive Power Brunch in Lagos, where industry leaders examined the implications of the Central Bank of Nigeria’s (CBN) 2027 deadline for mandatory data and infrastructure localisation.

Ogungbamila said the implementation of data localisation should go beyond simply ensuring that servers and transaction data are physically located within Nigeria, stressing that the resilience of the infrastructure supporting such systems would be critical to the success of the policy.

“Localization isn’t a single switch you flip—it’s an architecture decision,” Ogungbamila said.

He explained that payment companies typically operate transaction processing, cybersecurity and disaster recovery systems across multiple locations as part of their business continuity and risk-management strategies.

According to him, the key challenge is to distinguish between data and infrastructure that must remain within Nigeria for sovereignty and regulatory reasons and systems maintained outside the country as deliberate redundancy mechanisms.

“For any serious payments business, transaction processing, cybersecurity, and disaster recovery are rarely sitting in one place, and that’s usually by design, not oversight,” he said.

“The real work is distinguishing what must reside within Nigeria as a matter of sovereignty from what exists elsewhere as deliberate redundancy, because that redundancy is often the very thing protecting users when something fails.”

The Interswitch executive also raised concerns about the potential risks of concentrating critical financial infrastructure within a single jurisdiction without corresponding improvements in the country’s supporting infrastructure.

He noted that localisation could inadvertently concentrate operational risks if adequate investments were not made in electricity supply, telecommunications connectivity and disaster recovery capabilities.

“Resilience shouldn’t be treated as a box we tick before localization begins; it’s what localization has to build toward,” Ogungbamila said.

“Concentrating critical financial data within one jurisdiction can just as easily concentrate risk as remove it, unless it comes with real investment in local power, connectivity, and disaster recovery capacity.”

He urged stakeholders to view the 2027 deadline not merely as a regulatory compliance target but as an opportunity to strengthen Nigeria’s digital infrastructure and make data localisation sustainable.

“The deadline shouldn’t be read purely as a compliance line. It’s a call to build Nigeria’s infrastructure to a standard that makes localization genuinely safe, and not just symbolic,” he added.

Interswitch said it recognises data sovereignty as a legitimate national objective while emphasising that the effectiveness of localisation would ultimately depend on the ability of the underlying systems to withstand outages, cyber incidents and other real-world disruptions.

The payments technology company said it would continue engaging with regulators, industry players and infrastructure partners to contribute to the development of a localisation framework capable of strengthening the resilience of Nigeria’s financial ecosystem as digital payments continue to expand.