The Trust Frontier: Nigeria's Compliance Leaders Meet as Adhere Unveils Research with TechCabal
In Lagos today, Adhere, the AI compliance and fraud platform, and its research and media partner TechCabal unveiled a new industry report, The Compliance Reckoning: Regulating Financial Services in the Age of AI, at the Adhere Compliance Frontline Forum 2026, The Trust Frontier.
The report carries a blunt message for the room: Nigeria's reported fraud losses have fallen, but the threat has not, and the next eighteen months will decide which institutions come through intact.
Source: UGC
The report finds that digital payment fraud losses in Nigeria fell from N52.26 billion naira in 2024 to 25.85 billion naira in 2025. That headline conceals a harder truth. Losses have risen about 350% since 2020, even as the number of cases fell about 31%. Attacks are now fewer, more targeted, and far more costly per incident. (Source: The Compliance Reckoning.)
The report sets Nigeria in a global picture. It puts financial fraud losses worldwide at an estimated 442 billion dollars in 2025, and finds AI-enhanced fraud about 4.5 times more profitable than traditional methods. Nigeria processes more than 10 billion real-time transactions a year, yet ranks 110th of 112 countries for fraud protection, with a cybersecurity workforce gap of about 90%.
The regulatory perimeter is tightening at the same time. The report counts seventeen Central Bank of Nigeria actions in fourteen months across cyber, data protection and AML, six of them carrying hard deadlines between March 2026 and March 2028. A 15.42 billion naira fine on a leading commercial bank in 2025 signalled that non-compliance now threatens an institution's international correspondent relationships, not only its balance sheet.
Its central argument is blunt. The institutions that come through the next eighteen months intact will not be the ones with the best AI tools, but the ones with the architecture around them, built on proactive detection, full customer risk context, model governance, and collaboration across institutions.
The forum brought that argument into a room of practitioners and enforcement. AIG Uche Henry Ifeanyi, Assistant Inspector General of the Nigeria Police Force, delivered the keynote on financial crime enforcement. Across three panels, leaders joined from NIBSS, the EFCC, the Nigeria Police Force Cybercrime Lab, Paystack, PAYAZA, ChamsSwitch, Utila, Seerbit, Hydrogen Payment Services, Novac Payments, Odua Investment, Fastspeed Technologies, Vertiv, Rack Centre and Seequre. The forum was convened with TechCabal as research and media partner, and in partnership with the Cyber Security Experts Association of Nigeria (CSEAN), the country's leading body of cybersecurity professionals.
Adhere is the AI compliance and fraud platform for African financial services, built to make compliance and security part of every transaction rather than a check done after the money has moved. It is trusted by more than 1,000 companies, is ISO 27001 certified, is aligned to the Nigeria Data Protection Act, and is a Mastercard Engage partner. Adhere is part of the Smartcomply group.
“The fall in reported fraud is welcome, but it is also a warning. When reporting drops faster than fraud, the risk does not leave the system; it leaves the record. What this report shows is that the next eighteen months will be decided by architecture, not by tools. We built Adhere so that a bank or a fintech can meet the CBN's mandates and still see, transaction by transaction, what a quarterly review would miss,” said Gbemisola Osunrinde, Group Managing Director, Smartcomply
Source: Legit.ng
