Mr Lanre Osibona, Senior Special Assistant to the President on ICT, says Federal Government plans to enact policies that will encourage innovation and dynamism in the financial technology space.
Osibona made this known on Wednesday during the First Edition of the FINTECH Week 2019 held in Lagos.
The theme of the event was FinTech: “Exploring the huge opportunities”.
He said that aside from enacting policies, digital infrastructure was also critical to the scaling of fintechs.
The presidential aide on ICT said that enacting policies and building digital infrastructure would help the country towards becoming a digital economy.
“The approach to new technology investment initiatives of this administration ensures that there is associated skills transfer and human capacity development inline with the Executive Order 005.
“This is because there is a huge opportunity to ride on the fourth industrial revolution towards economic diversification and growth, social inclusion, job creation and transparency of process across sectors,” he added.
Osibona noted that the recent Payment Service Bank framework would position Nigeria as the digital economy giant.
“Digital financial services is a critical pillar of a robust digital economy.
“We are determined to bring affordable digital financial services to people who are currently unbanked or underbanked.
“We have also developed a data protection and privacy bill to ensuring trust between the government and citizens.
On ensuring cybersecurity, he said that the government was developing a robust cybersecurity framework following the outcome of the cyber security assessment initiated.
He said that government would collaborate with the private sector in developing policies and regulations that would address the challenges of data sovereignty, data ownership and commercialisation of data.
“We can not be defensive in our approach as no one can hold down the pace of development. We must be more proactive in ensuring that we prepare for the opportunities that the future will present to us,” he said.
Osibona, however, said that a big hindrance to the digital economy was the lack of connectivity and supporting infrastructure. =====NAN
