Dike Onwuamaeze
As the January 1, 2027, deadline given by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) for Nigerian financial institutions to host their data within the country approaches, MTN Nigeria Plc has said that it is setting up local infrastructure that would help these institutions to navigate the migration.
This was disclosed by the Chief Enterprise Business Officer for MTN Nigeria, Ms. Lynda Saint-Nwafor.
According to Saint-Nwafor, “Hosting locally means lower latency, faster response times, and compliance with Nigeria’s data regulations. More importantly, it gives Nigerian businesses control, keeping sensitive financial, health, and government data within national borders.”
She explained that in order to mitigate these operational risks, MTN are mobilising domestic capacity and technical insights tailored for the financial sector.
“By offering sovereign cloud solutions and collaborative engineering frameworks, MTN is helping CIOs and startups navigate the migration path with minimal disruption. Their localised infrastructure serves as an operational bridge, providing the uptime and data sovereignty assurances that both institutions and regulators require,” she said.
Saint-Nwafor explained further that MTN’s data centre and cloud offering was “about data sovereignty, scale, and sustainability.
She said, “It is designed to keep Africa’s data in Africa while enabling businesses to scale securely. For MTN, it aligns with our vision to be the leading digital solutions provider across Africa, building infrastructure that supports long-term economic transformation.”
The CBN’s directive enjoined every licensed bank, fintech, mobile money operator, and payment processor in the country to ensure that payment transaction data generated within Nigeria is stored and managed within domestic borders.
This regulatory directive would curtail an estimated $850 million currently leaving the country annually to power foreign cloud dependencies.
It is estimated that the Nigerian financial ecosystem is processing an upward of 14 billion digital transactions each year, which experts believed that localising their storage will be far more complex than a standard vendor replacement.
She said that to mitigate these operational risks, MTN is mobilising domestic capacity and technical insights tailored for the financial sector.