The federal government plans to tap into the huge opportunities in the fourth industrial revolution that tilts towards economic diversification and growth, social inclusion for job creation and transparency of processes across sectors.

Mr Lanre Osibona, senior special assistant to the president on ICT made the disclosure during the first edition of the FINTECH Week 2019 held in Lagos, saying that the federal government plans to enact policies that will encourage innovation and dynamism in the financial technology space.

At the event which had the theme, “Exploring the huge opportunities,” Osibona said that aside from enacting policies, digital infrastructure was also critical to the scaling of FINTECHs as 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 in line 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 said.

Noting that the recent Payment Service Bank framework would position Nigeria as the digital economy giant, Osibona said “digital financial services are critical pillars of robust digital economies. We are determined to bring affordable digital financial services to people who are currently unbanked or under banked. We have also developed a data protection and privacy bill to ensuring trust between the government and citizens.”

On ensuring cyber security, he said that the government was developing a robust cyber security framework following the outcome of the cyber security assessment initiative; saying to that extent, 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 cannot 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, bemoaned lack of connectivity and supporting infrastructure as big hindrance to this desire for a full scale digital economy.

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