The year was 2023, and artificial intelligence had just emerged as the latest magic tool for hacking productivity. Across corporate Nigeria, the technology was witnessing rapid adoption across sectors, especially in banking.
Everyone hailed its immense potential. But certain stakeholders were a bit worried, although they seldom expressed it publicly. The fear was that once AI matured enough for formal enterprise integration, support, and back-office processes, legacy IT firms would be out-competed by leaner, AI-native platforms.
Looking back, it’s easy to see where this worry was coming from. But the reality on the ground today is that AI isn’t killing legacy infrastructure providers. Instead, it has unlocked immense opportunities for them. Fintech veteran Charles Ifedi, who serves as Chief Executive Officer of Inlaks, highlighted these opportunities during an exclusive interview with Nairametrics. “AI is both a threat and an opportunity,” Ifedi noted calmly. “You have to identify the areas that AI would make obsolete and then the areas that AI would help accelerate… AI has not eliminated third-party infrastructure partners; it has made us more indispensable than ever.”
Why AI needs legacy tech firms
Inlaks is one of the oldest and most influential system integration firms in Nigeria and across Sub-Saharan Africa.
Founded over 44 years ago, the company has helped to power the core banking systems, ATM networks, and server architectures of major commercial banks and central banks across Africa. For a company that built its fortune in an era of mainframe servers and manual system deployments, the AI revolution could easily be perceived as an existential threat. But the CEO minimised the threat, choosing instead to describe AI as the catalyst for a fundamental pivot that is spawning a new, multi-billion-dollar infrastructure economy. He also argued that some sensitive tasks cannot yet be handled by AI due to enterprise trust and security concerns. “Enterprise integration is not something you just turn over to an algorithm. Even for organisations that aggressively adopt AI, they will not trust AI 100% to handle full integration between two complex financial systems because there is so much that must be scrutinised from both an integrity and security perspective before an integration is declared live.”
Where AI is genuinely outperforming human capability, he acknowledged, is in raw data processing.
But even there, a massive structural bottleneck exists. The reality is that African enterprise data is notoriously messy, fragmented across legacy silos, and structured in incompatible formats.
This data fragmentation not only poses a challenge to companies, but also to AI. According to research findings by Gartner, up to 85% of corporate AI projects fail to deliver on their intended return on investment due to poor data quality, weak data governance, and fragmented infrastructure. For African companies/institutions attempting to plug large language models (LLMs) into four-decade-old core banking software, the failure rate can be alarming.
This reality has opened up a lucrative new business line for legacy tech firms to prepare the enterprise “data layer” for machine ingestion. Therefore, rather than replacing system integrators like Inlaks, banks are hiring them to clean up their data schemas, validate records, and establish secure pipelines that AI algorithms can use for generating accurate insights without hallucinating or leaking sensitive customer information. CBN’s localisation mandate has provided another opportunity
On June 15, 2026, the Central Bank of Nigeria issued a directive requiring banks, microfinance institutions, and mobile money operators to store and process all Nigeria-generated payment transaction data on infrastructure located within the country. The deadline for compliance is January 1, 2027. The policy effectively forces these institutions to migrate meaningful workloads to local infrastructure, thereby ending years-long reliance on global cloud platforms like AWS and Azure. As expected, Ifedi welcomes the directive because it provides more opportunities for companies like his. “With the latest CBN data localisation directives, institutions that want to leverage advanced technology must upscale their local infrastructure.
Companies like ours that can build, maintain, and support that local hardware are poised for substantial new business,” he said. But data centres are not cheap to build
According to The African Data Centres Association (ADCA), Sub-Saharan Africa currently accounts for less than 1% of global co-location data centre capacity.
For Nigeria specifically, its data centre market is worth a paltry $322.65 million, as of 2025 valuation. It is projected to grow to about $374 million in 2026, and double to nearly $783 million by 2031. In the same vein, total IT load capacity is expected to climb from roughly 209 megawatts in 2025 to over 317 megawatts by 2030.
These are clearly small numbers by global standards. But being forced to scale rapidly under a fixed regulatory deadline is precisely what spurs growth. Inlaks is ready for the challenge. But it won’t be a smooth ride. Mr Ifedi acknowledged that hosting data locally will cost more than hosting it abroad. There is also the concern about Nigeria’s unstable power supply.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that data centre electricity consumption worldwide could double this year, driven almost entirely by the computational demands of AI models and cloud expansion. Critics often point out the paradox of pushing for compute-heavy AI data centres in countries where basic manufacturing plants struggle for steady grid electricity. How can enterprise IT providers justify scaling server stacks when diesel generation costs threaten to devour commercial margins? Take Nigeria’s national grid as an example; it can barely support local demand as it stands. There is no doubt that the addition of data centres will push it to the brink of collapse. The only feasible alternative would be to rely on diesel.
And doing that would only triple the operating costs, given skyrocketing diesel prices. When pressed on this critical issue, the Inlaks chief admitted that the energy burden is real, but argued that the solution lies in specialised micro-grid engineering tailored for enterprise institutions rather than relying exclusively on massive utility-scale facilities.
“We are not talking about building massive hyper-scale facilities like the telcos. We are focusing on energy-efficient data centres specifically engineered for banks, pension administrators, and insurance firms. We recently helped a major commercial bank solarise their primary data centre, integrating solar arrays, high-efficiency battery storage, and smart inverter systems. They saw their energy costs drop from 100% down to 21%, marking a 79% reduction in operational energy expenses over the lifetime of the installation.”
It should be noted that a massive buildout of data centres is underway in Nigeria. Telecom giants and infrastructure funds are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into tier-three and tier-four facility footprints. For instance, MTN and Airtel Africa have committed massive capital investments to construct state-of-the-art hyper-edge facilities across West and East Africa.
Pivot or die
Pivoting is arguably one of the toughest decisions any company will ever have to make, especially for a legacy IT firm. But resisting this transformation might as well mark the beginning of the end for said business. In the past four decades, Inlaks has had to reinvent itself many times to remain relevant in the continuously changing tech landscape. And since he was appointed CEO, Ifedi has helped reinforce the pivot. When asked about the toughest decision of his tenure, the Inlaks chief mentioned executing a cultural and operational shift from an OEM-dependent (Original Equipment Manufacturer) hardware vendor into an agile, service-led, and product-driven solutions provider. “The hardest part of leadership is moving a firm away from what made it successful in the past. Historically, we were known for selling infrastructure and enterprise software off the shelf.
But transitioning to say, ‘We don’t just want to sell hardware; we want to build, implement, support, and own the IP’ is a massive operational lift. It requires balancing short-term financial demands with heavy long-term R&D investments.”
As part of this product-led evolution, the firm is embedding proprietary AI engines directly into its banking software suites. Rather than expecting banks to build custom machine learning systems from scratch, Inlaks is integrating localised voice-banking capabilities, intelligent chat workflows, and paperless branch automation into its existing core offerings. This allows regional banks to offer conversational banking in local languages, a crucial feature for deepening financial inclusion in markets where literacy barriers continue to hinder traditional smartphone banking adoption. The defining frontiers of Africa’s fintech future
Beyond the immediate localisation needs, Ifedi lays out what he sees as the three defining growth frontiers for African fintech infrastructure in the next four years and beyond. These include data readiness for AI, stablecoins, and embedded finance. On data infrastructure for AI, he noted that as enterprises move past the hype phase of generative AI, the focus will eventually shift entirely to data normalisation, secure API access, and enterprise data mesh architectures that allow AI models to query multi-legacy databases safely.
On stablecoins, he explained that as global payment giants like Visa and regional infrastructure providers continue to integrate stablecoin rails into settlement networks, digital fiat assets will fundamentally transform cross-border corporate trade, liquidity management, and remittance settlement across Africa’s fragmented currency regimes. Lastly on embedded finance, he observed that financial services are migrating away from standalone banking apps and embedding directly into commercial supply chains. Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) conglomerates will increasingly offer credit, working capital, and treasury accounts directly to their distribution networks, while HR platforms provide on-demand earned wage access to enterprise workforces.
