Announcements, on the record.

LAGOS, Nigeria, August 29, 2026. WrkFlws, Inc., the vendor-neutral banking digital transformation and AI consultancy, today announced its return to Nigeria and plans to open an office in Lagos. The firm, which operated in Nigeria as GIBC Digital from an office in Abuja, left the country in 2021 after prolonged COVID-19 lockdowns made on-site delivery inside banks impossible.

The return follows a series of Central Bank of Nigeria directives that will significantly change how Nigerian banks store data, monitor transactions, and serve customers. Chief among them is the circular of 15 June 2026 requiring all payment transaction data generated in Nigeria to be stored and managed within Nigeria by 1 January 2027, alongside new market-structure, beneficial-ownership, and systemic-oversight requirements for the payments system, and the continued rollout of open banking.

"We left Nigeria in 2021 because lockdowns made it impossible to do the kind of work we do, which is inside the bank, alongside its people," said Greg Wood, Founder and Group CEO of WrkFlws. "We are coming back because the CBN has set banks a series of deadlines that will change how they hold data, monitor risk, and serve customers, and most institutions cannot meet those deadlines on the foundations they have today. Most banks will satisfy the localisation deadline by moving what they have, as it is, to a Nigerian cloud. That meets the circular and changes nothing about the data: the duplicates, the gaps, and the five versions of the same customer all move with it. The deadline is the moment to fix that, and it is exactly the work we exist to do. We are paid to leave, and we intend to leave Nigerian banks with capability they own."

WrkFlws works inside banks, market infrastructure, and government payment programs on the data foundations, financial-crime and compliance automation, AI systems, core platforms, and operating models that regulators now expect institutions to evidence. Engagements are fixed-price, delivered on-premise under the client's controls, and end with the client owning all intellectual property and running the systems with its own staff. The firm licenses no software and takes no reseller margin, so its advice on what to build and what to buy is unconflicted.

The regulatory agenda arrives as Nigerian banks are moving quickly on AI. Most are piloting it in customer service, credit, and fraud; far fewer have taken those pilots into production, and the obstacle is usually the foundation rather than the model: customer data fragmented across core, cards, and channels, and no controlled layer between a model and the systems of record. The Lagos team will focus on that path, starting with data governance, then the design and build of an orchestration layer that sits above the core and never modifies it, with the monitoring, audit trail, and model governance that regulators expect, and finishing with the bank's own staff running it.

"Every bank in Nigeria has an AI pilot. Very few have AI in production, and the reason is rarely the model," Wood said. "It is the data underneath it, and the absence of anything between the model and the core. Our approach is the same in every institution: govern the data first, so the model is reading one version of the truth, then build an orchestration layer above the core where the model proposes, policy permits, a controlled service executes, and the core records it. The bank rents the model. It owns the mandate, the data, and the code."

In Lagos, WrkFlws is recruiting a senior business development lead and a financial crime subject-matter expert, and is forming an advisory board drawn from senior Nigerian banking leadership. Open roles are listed at wrkflws.com/careers.

The announcement follows the firm's participation in the 10DX Summit Nigeria Edition in Lagos this week, where Wood delivered a keynote titled "The Path to AI in Production."