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Africa’s financial services sector is entering a phase of strategic consolidation, with the long-running fintech hype beginning to fade just as cybersecurity risks intensify, according to the 2025 African Financial Industry Barometer.
The report, produced by Deloitte in collaboration with the Africa Financial Summit, draws on interviews with senior executives from more than 70 financial institutions across the continent. It points to a clear shift in priorities as firms move away from rapid expansion towards profitability, efficiency, and resilience.
For much of the past decade, fintechs have been at the heart of Africa’s digital transformation story. However, the barometer shows a more restrained outlook as operators are now under pressure to prove their economic viability in a tougher operating environment.
Industry confidence in fintech has fallen to 8.33 out of 10, down from a peak of 9.25 in 2023. While overall confidence in the financial sector has rebounded, supported by easing inflation and improved operational visibility, fintechs are no longer riding on optimism alone.
“The sector is returning to fundamentals,” the report noted, identifying profitability, cybersecurity, and operational efficiency as the top strategic priorities. Fintechs, once highly confident about their financial outlook, are now expected to demonstrate sustainable business models and consistent returns.
Although the transition from “expansion to execution” suggests that the initial fintech gold rush is stabilising, the report argues that this shift is strengthening the resilience of Africa’s financial ecosystem.
As attention turns away from hype, a more pressing challenge has emerged: cybersecurity. The report confirms cyber risk as a systemic issue, now the leading concern for financial institutions across Africa. About 51 per cent of firms identified cybersecurity as their primary risk, a 12-percentage-point increase within a year, while 97 per cent ranked it as the top regulatory priority.
Despite widespread investment in digital security, the barometer highlights a troubling gap between detection and response. While 70 per cent of institutions have fully operational monitoring and alert systems, only 65 per cent have robust response and recovery capabilities. This imbalance, the report warns, leaves institutions exposed, with teams able to detect incidents quickly but lacking automated containment measures, tested playbooks, or rapid recovery processes.
Without effective failover procedures and reconstruction capabilities, the report cautions that “every compromise becomes existential”.
These findings echo recent warnings from Nigeria’s payments infrastructure. Speaking at a technical session, the Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of NIBSS Plc, Premier Oiwoh, said digital payments fraud has increased in “scale, speed, and sophistication”.
While total fraud losses in Nigeria declined sharply from ₦52.26 billion in 2024 to ₦25.85 billion in 2025, Oiwoh stressed that the threat itself is evolving. He identified social engineering as the dominant risk by both volume and value, noting that fraud is increasingly driven by human manipulation rather than direct system breaches.
Internet banking, he said, has become a low-volume but high-value target, accounting for the largest financial losses in 2025.
Oiwoh also raised concerns about a drop in reported fraud incidents, with the number of Nigerian institutions reporting cases falling from 45 in mid-2024 to 34 by late 2025. He warned that this decline could point to underreporting, a trend that risks weakening trust and resilience across the financial ecosystem.
Overall, the report suggests that as Africa’s fintech sector matures, success will be defined less by rapid growth and more by profitability, security, and the ability to manage increasingly complex risks.
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