By Prince Osuagwu, Hi-Tech Editor
Jeffrey Osadebame Elimihe is a banker, technologist and a lecturer. He is the current Chief Information Officer at Zenith Bank, Sierra Leone.
He has led large-scale core infrastructure programs, retail digital expansion, and national payments integrations across West Africa.
In this interview, Elimihe discusses secure payments, AI in banking, talent pipelines, and the bridges Africa and the United States can build in technology.
Excerpts:
You have multiple disciplines from academia to banking and tech frontiers. How do you want to be described?
I’m a hands-on technology leader focused on resilient banking infrastructure and secure digital channels. I began in frontline support and networking, progressed through enterprise systems and storage engineering, then moved into leadership. I now serve as CIO at Zenith Bank, Sierra Leone, where I sit on executive committees to align technology with business goals, cybersecurity, uptime, compliance, and digital growth. I also lecture on topics like mobile banking and digital analytics, because the pipeline of skilled people is just as critical as the technology itself.
Considering your role as a CIO, what technical bedrock still matters in a cloud and AI era?
The fundamentals haven’t changed: reliability, security, observability, and recovery. Whether you’re deploying on-prem IBM Power/AIX or elastic cloud services, those pillars remain. In the banking context, latency, HA/DR design, patch discipline, and change governance are non-negotiable.
With all these experiences, are there landmark transformations you’ve helped steer in the system?
I’ll give two examples. First, the retail digital drive: we expanded reliable infrastructure to support peak transaction loads and instant payment rails, so a market trader or a salary earner could transact anytime, anywhere, with confidence. Second, in Sierra Leone, we executed core initiatives like onboarding to the national switch for cards and instant payments, which created true interoperability between banks and channels. Those changes feel technical on the inside, but on the outside, they simply mean faster reconciliations, and reduced cash dependence.
Usually, banks often wrestle with messy data, will AI readiness make any difference in West African banking?
AI readiness starts with data discipline: clear ownership, quality pipelines, and metadata. You need trusted data zones, model monitoring, and explainability; more concretely, modernised core infrastructure. Privacy and compliance controls reflect regional laws.
For us, the wins come when AI augments, not replaces human judgment in risk, collections, and service.
Cybersecurity keeps CEOs awake at night. In your environment, what’s the practical playbook?
Three lenses: prevention, detection, and resilience. Prevention is hardening, least privilege, MFA, network segmentation, and vendor access control. Detection is SIEM plus behavioral analytics fed by clean logs. Resilience is tested backup and recovery, immutable storage where appropriate, and tabletop exercises that include the C-suite. Culture matters: engineers need air cover to delay risky releases; executives need dashboards to understand trade-offs; and procurement must treat cybersecurity as a first-order requirement, not an optional add-on.
Many African CIOs complain about vendor lock-in. How do you balance best-of-breed with long-term flexibility?
Begin with a reference architecture that forces open interfaces and data portability. For mission-critical cores, lock-in might be unavoidable, but integration layers, APIs, event streams must remain vendor-neutral.
You teach mobile banking and financial innovations. What’s the next big inclusion lever for Nigeria and the region?
I see three levers: One; Interoperable instant payments at the last mile. If micro-merchants and rural agents can reliably accept low-value instant transfers and cash out, adoption becomes habitual.
Two; embedded finance for SMEs. If ERPs and POS systems expose credit signals, banks can underwrite faster with better risk stratification.
Three; Responsible data sharing. With customer consent frameworks, alternate data, utility payments, mobile usage, verified IDs, can bring thin-file customers into formal finance.
Inclusion succeeds when UX is simple, fees are transparent, and settlement is dependable even on low bandwidth.
Where do you see the U.S.-Africa tech collaboration yielding the biggest near-term impact?
Payments, cybersecurity, and talent exchange. U.S. fintech and cloud firms can partner with African banks and regulators to harden real-time payments, AML, and consumer protection frameworks. Joint cyber ranges and shared threat intelligence would upgrade resilience for everyone.
Many banks struggle to modernize without disruption. What’s your blueprint for change management?
Treat modernisation like open-heart surgery. You need parallel environments, canary releases, clear rollback paths, and obsessive communication. Start with customer-in, risk first thinking: which journeys break most often? Which internal processes cause outages. Then sequence projects so the most valuable, least risky items go first.
You’ve helped banks through currency and regulatory transitions. How do you protect continuity when the macro environment shifts?
Build scenario libraries that mix technical and operational drills: FX shocks, regulatory changes, switch outages, card scheme issues. Align treasury, operations, and IT so data and decisions move in sync.
What’s your advice to Nigerian universities that want to produce graduates ready for bank-grade engineering roles?
Tighten the bridge between curriculum and production. Embed co-ops/industrial attachments in core courses, not as afterthoughts. Teach Linux fundamentals, networking, databases, secure coding, observability, and incident command. Let students deploy a mini payments sandbox with consented data and simulate PCI DSS scenarios.
From your vantage point, what can Nigerian and African regulators do now to catalyze safe innovation?
Clarity and consistency. Publish regulatory sandboxes with explicit security and consumer protection baselines. Encourage open APIs with permissioned data sharing. Harmonize e-KYC using national identification systems while preserving privacy. Offer fast lanes for proven solutions in fraud reduction, financial inclusion, and SME credit. Finally, talent mobility makes it easy for African engineers trained in the U.S. or Europe to work across the continent without red tape.
For nearly two decades, you’ve gone from setting up branch networks to architecting enterprise platforms. What keeps you going?
Three habits. Stay curious, lab everything, from a new container runtime to a novel SIEM rule. Teach, when you explain a concept to students or junior engineers, your own understanding deepens. And mentor, help people step into bigger roles; their growth compounds the organisation’s resilience. Across my roles, Regional Network/Support Engineer, Head of InfoTech Workshop, Enterprise Systems & Storage Manager, and now CIO, those habits kept me grounded and evolving.
For the benefit of cross-border career seekers, how important is certification?
For me, my BSc in Computer Engineering built the technical base; the MBA in Management Information Systems sharpened the strategy lens. Certifications, RHCE, MCSE, ITIL, COBIT, added structure. But the biggest accelerator was ownership: taking end-to-end responsibility for uptime, security, and delivery. Titles help; accountability transforms.
Can you guess where banking in West Africa will be in five years from now?
Customers won’t think bank vs. fintech. They’ll think trusted financial operating system, seamless ID, credit, savings, investing, and protection, integrated into daily life. Under the hood: zero-trust security, real-time risk engines, AI copilots for staff, and embedded compliance that reduces friction. Banks that master data governance, API ecosystems, and talent development will lead. Those that treat tech as a cost center will fall behind.
The post In next five years, banks treating tech as cost center ‘ll fall behind — Jeffery Elimihe, CIO Zenith bank, Sierra Leone appeared first on Vanguard News.
