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By Adewale Adedeji, Managing Director/CEO, Datamellon
There is a statistic that has stayed with me since I first encountered it in the CBN’s own fintech industry data. Eighty-seven and a half percent of Nigerian fintechs say that compliance costs already limit their ability to innovate. That number is striking, not because it is surprising, but because of what it reveals about how the Nigerian financial industry has come to think about regulation — as a constraint. As a tax. As friction between ambition and execution.
I want to challenge that framing.
Nigeria’s payments story is one of the most consequential technology-led transformations in modern African economic history. In less than fifteen years, we went from a largely cash-dependent economy to one where NIBSS processes tens of millions of instant payment transactions every day. Mobile money, USSD banking, digital wallets, agency banking. Nigeria built world-class digital financial infrastructure at a pace that few predicted and fewer matched.
