By Lanre Shittu
Senior Machine Learning/AI Engineer & Researcher | IEEE Senior Member, MBCS
Years before I wrote a line of machine learning code, I learned a rule that never really leaves you: a building doesn’t fail at the roof first. It fails at the foundation, long before anyone notices anything is wrong. You can put up the most beautiful floors in the world on top of a foundation that was never built to hold their weight, and for a while, it will look completely fine. Structural failure rarely announces itself. It builds up quietly, stress by stress, until the day it doesn’t.
I think about that rule often now, watching how fast African tech is racing to plug AI into systems that were never built to carry it.
There’s a real example of this playing out in South Africa right now. The South African Reserve Bank is rolling out its Payments Ecosystem Modernisation Programme, a shift that will let fintechs and other non-bank companies plug directly into the country’s payment clearing and settlement systems, something that used to require going through a sponsoring bank. In practice, that sponsor bank used to quietly absorb a lot of the safety work: fraud checks, reconciliation, the “what happens if something breaks” layer. Once that sponsor is out of the picture, all of that responsibility lands squarely on the fintech’s own systems. Nobody else is holding it up anymore.
