The Association of Licensed Telecommunications Operators of Nigeria has endorsed the Central Bank of Nigeria’s directive requiring banks, fintechs, and other payment service providers to store all payment transaction data generated in Nigeria on local servers from January 1, 2027, describing the policy as an important step toward achieving national data sovereignty and reducing the economic and security costs of hosting critical financial data offshore.
ALTON Chairman Gbenga Adebayo said data sovereignty required countries to take full responsibility for the entire lifecycle of their data, from collection and management to storage and integrity assurance, and that outsourcing that function to foreign jurisdictions was no longer acceptable for a country of Nigeria’s scale and ambitions. He said every transaction involving data hosted outside Nigeria required communication to travel to the host location and back, increasing latency and data retrieval costs in ways that added up across billions of daily transactions.
He dismissed concerns about domestic infrastructure readiness, saying Nigeria already had significant data center capacity including approximately six Tier 3 facilities, with Nigerian-owned data centers currently hosting data for organizations operating from other countries. He said the argument that foreign infrastructure was more secure or reliable did not hold up, saying no one could protect data better than a country with a direct stake in its security and integrity.
He said local hosting would also reduce foreign currency expenditure by allowing data storage to be paid for in naira rather than dollars, reducing exposure to exchange rate pressures for the financial institutions and fintech operators covered by the directive.
