Senior compliance leaders in Nigeria’s financial services sector convened in Lagos today for the Adhere Compliance Frontline Forum 2026, “The Trust Frontier.” The event, co-hosted by Adhere, an AI compliance and fraud platform, and its research and media partner TechCabal, saw the unveiling of a pivotal industry report, “The Compliance Reckoning: Regulating Financial Services in the Age of AI.” The report delivers a stark warning: while reported fraud losses have decreased, the underlying threat has intensified, positioning the next eighteen months as a critical period that will determine the resilience of financial institutions.
The research highlights a significant drop in reported digital payment fraud losses, from N52.26 billion in 2024 to N25.85 billion in 2025. However, this headline figure masks a more concerning trend. Fraud losses have surged by approximately 350% since 2020, even as the number of reported cases has declined by about 31%. This indicates a shift towards fewer, more sophisticated, and significantly more costly attacks per incident.
Globally, financial fraud losses were estimated at $442 billion in 2025, with AI-enhanced fraud proving to be approximately 4.5 times more profitable than traditional methods. Nigeria, despite processing over 10 billion real-time transactions annually, ranks a precarious 110th out of 112 countries for fraud protection, compounded by a substantial 90% cybersecurity workforce gap.
Simultaneously, the regulatory landscape is tightening. The Central Bank of Nigeria has issued seventeen directives across cyber, data protection, and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) in the past fourteen months, with six carrying firm deadlines between March 2026 and March 2028. A substantial N15.42 billion fine levied on a major commercial bank in 2025 underscores the escalating consequences of non-compliance, now impacting international correspondent banking relationships in addition to balance sheets.
The report’s central thesis is that institutional survival in the coming eighteen months will hinge not on the adoption of advanced AI tools alone, but on the robust architecture supporting them. This architecture must encompass proactive detection, comprehensive customer risk profiling, rigorous model governance, and inter-institutional collaboration.
The forum facilitated a critical dialogue between industry practitioners and enforcement agencies. Keynote remarks on financial crime enforcement were delivered by AIG Uche Henry Ifeanyi of the Nigeria Police Force. Panels featured senior representatives 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 event was convened in partnership with TechCabal and the Cyber Security Experts Association of Nigeria (CSEAN).
Adhere, an AI compliance and fraud platform designed for African financial services, aims to embed compliance and security into every transaction. Trusted by over 1,000 companies, Adhere is ISO 27001 certified, aligned with the Nigeria Data Protection Act, and a Mastercard Engage partner, operating as part of the Smartcomply group.
“The fall in reported fraud is welcome, but it is also a warning,” stated a representative from Adhere. “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.”
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