Ronald Martey | Code of the continent: Why sovereignty is the new frontier for African fintech

For much of the past decade, African fintech has been defined by speed: onboarding customers, launching products, scaling across borders and attracting investment. That formula worked: Africa now hosts some of the world’s fastest-growing fintech ecosystems, transforming finance for hundreds of millions.

Today, a new race has begun. It is no longer just about who can innovate fastest, but about who controls the infrastructure on which innovation depends. Sovereignty has become the next competitive frontier.

The layer nobody sees

Customers do not think about where their data is stored; they care that payments go through and that their money is safe. Beneath that lies a vast infrastructure: cloud platforms, data centres, identity systems, fraud engines, AI models and payment networks. African governments are now asking who owns and governs this infrastructure, and the answers are reshaping regulation across the continent.

From compliance to strategy

A circular dated 15 June 2026 from the Central Bank of Nigeria requires banks, fintechs, mobile money operators and other payment providers to store Nigerian payment data on local servers, with full compliance by 1 January 2027. It redefines who may sit at the centre of Nigeria’s payments system.

Kenya’s Data Protection Act, 2019 allows the Cabinet Secretary to require that certain data processing occur only in Kenya, on grounds of strategic state interest or revenue protection. Enforced by an increasingly active Data Protection Commissioner, the Act creates a very different operating environment.

Rwanda has largely built digital infrastructure rather than imposing restrictive localisation. In February 2025, RSwitch launched eKash, the consumer-facing service of its upgraded National Digital Payment System, built on the open-source Mojaloop. It has also strengthened its digital public infrastructure through the Centre for Digital Public Infrastructure and, in 2026, the Rwanda FinTech Centre.

South Africa combines the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA), fully enforceable since July 2021, with the National Policy on Data and Cloud, published in May 2024. POPIA regulates the processing and cross-border transfer of personal information, while the policy promotes domestic hosting of government data relating to national security, sovereignty and strategic state interests, a risk-based approach rather than blanket localisation.

Four countries, four mechanisms, one direction: financial data is now treated as strategic national infrastructure, protected alongside ports, grids, telecoms and airspace. Data governance is shifting from privacy to economic policy,  a far bigger shift than new storage rules.

Why dependency has become a problem

Much of Africa’s financial system runs on infrastructure African institutions do not own, on platforms they cannot influence, and under jurisdictions where their voice carries little weight. That was tolerable when the world felt stable. Now, geopolitical tensions can disrupt services overnight, foreign regulation can restrict data access, and providers’ disputes can ripple down to local institutions. Sovereign capability does not mean abandoning global partnerships; it means having options when the world quivers, with resilience measured by how many strategic choices remain when things go wrong.

Trust has become a national question

Trust in banks, regulators and stable markets now extends to the digital infrastructure beneath them. Questions once confined to the CTO’s office now reach boardrooms and cabinets: Where is our data processed? Whose laws govern access? How quickly can we recover if a provider goes dark? These are governance questions, and answering them well signals institutional maturity.

The next frontier is AI, not just storage

Where data lives is not where value is created. Tomorrow’s payment intelligence, fraud detection and credit scoring will rely on AI models trained on African data, so sovereignty extends to who builds, trains and governs that intelligence. A fraud model trained on the transactions of a hundred million African consumers is among the most valuable assets an ecosystem can produce; if built offshore, the upside accrues elsewhere. Countries that recognise this early will invest in compute, talent and model governance alongside data centres; those that do not will rent back their own intelligence.

The AfCFTA problem

The AfCFTA Digital Trade Protocol, adopted in February 2024, envisages a single African digital market of over a billion people, where data flows as freely as goods. But if Nigeria’s payment data must stay in Nigeria, Kenya’s in Kenya, and South Africa’s in South Africa, what does that market look like? Continent-wide fintech needs interoperable rails; fifty-four localisation regimes may deliver the opposite. The emerging answer is “sovereignty and interoperability”: sovereign national infrastructure connected via continental rails such as the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System, harmonised by AfCFTA-aligned standards. Getting that balance wrong poses the biggest policy risk for African fintech; getting it right could set a new model for regional integration.

The overlooked investment opportunity

Sovereignty is often framed as a cost, yet every localisation policy creates demand for capabilities that barely existed at scale locally: local cloud, regional data centres, cybersecurity, digital identity, sovereign AI capacity, compliance technology and digital trust services — each an industry in the making. Industries create jobs, expertise builds on those jobs, and expertise attracts investment. Sovereignty starts to look less like a regulatory burden and more like an industrial strategy Africa has under-invested in for years.

The risk of overcorrecting

More rules are not automatically better; isolation is not resilience. Overly rigid localisation would force African fintechs to pay more, innovate more slowly, and fragment the regional markets that underpin the continent’s scale advantage. Digital walls are easy to build and painful to dismantle. The goal is strategic autonomy, not digital isolation: independent choices when it matters and full engagement with the global economy.

Where the next advantage comes from

The initial wave of African fintech focused on convenience, followed by a second wave focused on scale. The upcoming phase will be centred on trust, which can be quantified through factors like security measures, recovery times, data transparency, and governance transparency. Fintech companies that prioritise customer data security, invest in sovereign infrastructure where it counts, and align with national priorities will earn greater customer trust, attract more investor confidence, and be seen as partners by governments rather than as issues.

A different chapter

Africa’s fintech revolution was built on code; its next chapter will be built on control. The question is no longer where data lives, but who governs it, who benefits, and who can be trusted. Approached thoughtfully, sovereignty is not the opposite of innovation; it is the ground on which the next wave will stand. The future will not be decided by the smartest algorithm or the fastest payment rail, but by who owns the code, controls the infrastructure, and earns the trust of a continent digitising faster than almost anywhere else on Earth.

Ronald Martey is a cybersecurity and data privacy leader with senior leadership experience across banking, technology, and biomedical research, having held roles at the University of Cambridge – NIHR BioResource, GCB Bank PLC, and IBM. 

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