General News
Nigeria to become “Christmas tree” in Bandwidth- Kruyt
David Kruyt, managing director, Dimension Data West Africa has over 20 years experience in the ICT industry.
Kruyt joined Dimension Data in 2003 as customer advocate: sales, operating in South Africa’s Western Cape Province but in his current position, he is responsible for the management of the entire Western African region, from Cameroon to Liberia.
Over the past four years, Kruyt, has been instrumental in establishing Dimension Data’s Nigeria office.
Cisco Telepresence
I have taken customers to Cisco to sell them the option of Telepresence. Our biggest challenge in Nigeria is bandwidth, and Telepresence is largely dependent on bandwidth. Companies want to communicate internationally or locally – then Telepresence could be an option. Provided it is international, the bandwidth required to deploy it becomes very expensive. International connectivity here is going to stifle any growth in the Telepresence market. Telepresence is a fantastic product but the problem is bandwidth. If there is enough bandwidth – no problem. The issue is that you have a supply and demand situation here, so as long as the demand exceeds the supply, we are going to have issues. If the bandwidth is good and you can afford to pay for it, fantastic!
Environmental Monitoring Solutions and Businesses
Environmental monitoring can be related to a situation whereby you have a bank which is running multiple branches throughout the country, and they have requirements to keep their operations running at 99.99 percent. For power generation, environmental monitoring helps in monitoring the fuel level or charging the batteries. That and a number of others are the kinds of environmental monitoring solutions we put in place. It could be remote access control – for someone accessing a cell site of a GSM company without the right permission, we can have monitoring on that, whereby we send SMS or e-mail to the company, if it is connected. To ensure that technicians are not deployed to field for no reason, this kind of solution connects you pin-point to business-critical areas and issues are brought to your attention. You can understand sometimes if an ATM at The Palms or some remote village goes down, the priority is to get the one at The Palms up before that at the village. Those kinds of solutions would give you detailed information to make decisions around business.
Fibre Backbone
Dimension Data is an infrastructure company but it has a subsidiary called Internet Solution (IS), which is an ISP. IS leverages the likes of MTN using multiple options. Dimension Data does not provide their own infrastructure, but takes existing infrastructure, carry along on top of that and then maximize it for customers.
Putting in Place Customer Interaction Solutions
It all depends on the business needs. You have different applications around business requirements. If you look at the GSM world, their customers need to get information around their billings and issues concerning the network. In their interactions with their customers, the first touch point is the call centre. Now the call centre is not just about the telephone; it is a multiple channel to get hold of call centre agents whether by voice, e-mail, fax, SMS or whatever. So, the complexity of the solution that the service providers put in place to communicate with their customers, determines the kind of service we can offer such service provider. A call centre that cannot be reached either by e-mail, SMS or phone call has a big problem. As it is, 90 per cent of the call centres are over subscribed – you can never get through and you end up getting an automated message. I think there is a lot to be desired around the management of a call centre. The technology is the easy part; it is only about 10 per cent. Actually, the staffing, training and understanding of customers’ requirements are very crucial in the field. In the banking sub-sector, Internet banking, telephone banking, require a mature call centre agent to understand the needs of the customer and also have a history of what the customer has done. If I have an issue about a money transfer that was meant to have been deposited the day before and my feedback is that it is not in yet and I should call later; if I call the agent later on, he/she would be required to have a history of how many times I have called. The trend worldwide was to reduce the number of bank branches and go to call centres, but I think generally people like to have human contact. You see that in Nigeria now, and that is why you find numerous bank branches scattered all over. There are challenges around call centres per se, but you cannot do without them.
Idea of Good Network Security Solution
Security is not just network security, there is internal security, wider area network security – there is a bunch of stuffs which goes around security. So, I would say that security is something that needs to be monitored all the time, and you have to have a security provider who would actually proactively update from inside the business through the edge of the business, to the external business. Our biggest challenge today is data integrity and people stealing data. There are lots of good solutions coming up to address that issue. Dimension Data has a security business which uses the best of breeds from various vendors, and we put them together to give customers a holistic solution.
What are the implications of using products that have reached end-of-life?
Manufacturers provide support which lasts for a period of time – say 3 or 5 years. Once it gets to end of life, the support either ceases or becomes very expensive. There are certain devices that can run forever and you would never have an issue. The problem is, if you are running mission critical applications say banking, oil & gas applications or payroll, can you afford to run on equipment that are of end of life with no support? I would say no! If you are an enterprise business, you need to be able to provide services to your customers, it is imperative that you ensure you stay ahead of the game because if you do not, your competitors are going to provide a better service with innovations. That is what it is all about. People develop equipment that cannot last forever. Things change, we change; we want more out of our lives while doing it with less.
Strengths of IT as a Service
IT as a service is becoming a real part of our business now. An enterprise with a massive IT department could call on a company like Dimension Data that has a pool of resources in all levels that can be deployed on time required basis. IT as a service is difficult for customers to understand, but we are getting to a stage where we have the outsource and the in-source model – we would be providing manpower to do the job and the customer makes some service level agreements. If the system goes down or if the manpower is not available, we have to provide an alternative. Dimension Data is not a company where we provide services and not meet our service level agreements. We provide 100 per cent service level agreements, and are priority driven. That is a great opportunity for customers to leverage their kind of solutions. So I believe IT as a service is going to grow tremendously in the next 18 months to 3 years as the demand for it increases.
Dimension Data’s Global Services Operating Architecture in Nigeria
GSOA literally is a global services operation which cuts across the entire world. If a call is logged today in Nigeria, that call can be tracked to Europe, America and Asia. If we have an engineer who is based in London, he should able to offer support without stress. So we have become a global support centre. Having said that, Dimension Data does not manufacture anything. We provide 1st, 2nd and 3rd level and sometimes 4th level support. With the right agreement with the OEMs, we pass on the 4th level support to them to sort out. We are in global partnership with Cisco, Microsoft, IBM and a score of others.
Collocating for Best Results?
I am baffled how six operators can lay their own fibre throughout the country while in elsewhere, there are two or three national providers who provide infrastructure and everybody leverages on them. The infrastructure on ground in Nigeria now is non-functional. It could have provided a platform for every GSM and fixed line operator to carry their traffic on. Now with a situation whereby each operator puts his own fibre in the ground, I think there would come a time when all the operators realize that they need to work together, and would cooperate and provide interconnect not just on the GSM platform but in infrastructure, in order to make the best use of it. When two or three more offshore Internet cables come into this country, Nigeria would become like a “Christmas tree” in terms of bandwidth. When offshore cables arrive here, I think we would see a lot of interactions among all the operators – using one another’s fibre to get Internet and voice traffic to the end of Nigeria. So, maybe it is not a bad thing that these cables are laid now, but it is at a cost to the end users of ICT services. Mark my words, when reliable offshore cables come into this country, you are going to see business, education, healthcare and government grow to a higher level. Moreover, the more offshore cables, the better because those would drive down the cost of bandwidth in the country.
Fidelity Bank Plc, a leading financial institution, will host a free virtual training on the Nigeria Tax Act 2025 (NTA) as part of its commitment to helping small businesses prepare for the upcoming legislation.
Fidelity Bank
The masterclass is scheduled for 10:00 AM (Nigerian time) on Friday, 12 December 2025. It will provide participants with clear insights into changes in the tax framework, the impact on income and business operations, and practical steps to avoid penalties in 2026.
Attendees will also learn strategies to stay ahead in an evolving regulatory environment.
The Nigerian government enacted major tax reforms on 26 June 2025 when President Bola Ahmed Tinubu signed four tax bills into law.
These Acts will take effect on 1 January 2026 and represent a significant overhaul of the country’s tax system.
The reforms aim to modernize and harmonize Nigeria’s tax framework, improve revenue generation, broaden the tax base, and create clearer rules for individuals, businesses, and government agencies.
“Our decision to host this masterclass reflects our commitment to empowering businesses with the right information ahead of the commencement of the new tax regime.
“Information is money and a well-informed business owner is already steps ahead in the race to success.
“This is why we are bringing experts to provide accurate details and demystify the tax act,” said Osita Ede, Divisional Head, Product Development, Fidelity Bank Plc.
Interested participants can register via https://bit.ly/2026TaxLawMasterclass .
PalmPay, Nigeria’s leading digital banking platform, has renewed its commitment to deepening financial inclusion across the country. At the CeBIH Annual Conference 2025, themed “Reimagining Financial Inclusion through Cultural Shifts in Consumer Credit,” PalmPay’s Managing Director, Chika Nwosu, urged industry players to deepen financial inclusion by embracing community-aligned solutions and customer-centric innovations that can better serve Nigeria’s underserved and unbanked populations.
Speaking during a panel session titled “Social Inclusion, A Veritable Tool for Financial Inclusion,” Chika Nwosu joined other industry leaders to share insights on strengthening participation among women, rural dwellers, low-income earners, and other financially excluded groups.
Chika Nwosu highlighted PalmPay’s commitment to inclusive finance through its 500,000-strong agent network, which enables seamless cash-in/cash-out services for unbanked users across Nigeria. He also emphasised the importance of PalmPay’s USSD platform, 861#, which allows users with basic phones or limited internet access to perform essential financial transactions.
“Financial inclusion goes beyond access; it must be equitable and tailored to real-life needs,” Chika Nwosu said. He shared how PalmPay leverages behavioural insights to design impactful services, including affordable health insurance, reliable bill payments, merchant solutions, and automated savings features that support financial discipline among users.
The session further examined the role of grassroots agents and community touchpoints in driving last-mile adoption. Chika Nwosu noted that PalmPay’s widespread community presence continues to build trust and encourage excluded populations to embrace digital financial tools.
The session was moderated by Ronke Kuye of the CeBIH Advisory Council and featured representatives from E-Doc Online, SmartCash Payment Service Bank, SANEF, and EFINA.
PalmPay reaffirmed its commitment to driving accessible, secure, and inclusive financial services for all Nigerians. PalmPay is a leading digital banking platform driving financial inclusion and economic empowerment in underserved emerging markets. Through its secure, user-friendly, and inclusive suite of financial services, PalmPay empowers individuals and businesses with tools to manage and grow their money.
PalmPay offers a comprehensive range of products, including mobile payments, savings, and micro-insurance via its app and mobile money agent network.
Since launching in Nigeria in 2019 under a Mobile Money Operator license, the platform has grown to over 35 million app users. PalmPay has operations in Nigeria, Ghana, Tanzania, and Bangladesh.
Reality Defender and 1Kosmos have announced a strategic partnership that will see the deepfake detection firm integrate its real-time deepfake defenses into 1Kosmos’ blockchain-based biometric authentication platform.
Deepfake
A release says the integration enhances the platform’s existing PAD capabilities with new signals on both live and pre-recorded AI-generated image and video impersonations: “multimodal deepfake detection” that “enhances ISO/IEC 30107-3 PAD Level 2 performance to counter the growing share of synthetic-media attacks.”
“Deepfake attacks are evolving faster than most organizations can adapt, and detecting them requires specialized, continuously updated models,” says Ben Colman, CEO of Reality Defender. Reality Defender’s models keep pace with regulatory changes like the EU AI Act and upcoming ISO 25456 standards, to ensure seamless compliance.
“Advances in AI-generated impersonations are rewriting the rules of identity assurance and ratcheting up fraud losses,” says Mike Engle, chief strategy officer for 1Kosmos. “By adding Reality Defender as an embedded detection layer, we’re enabling enterprises to verify identity with greater certainty and stop AI-driven impersonation attacks before they result in financial loss, brand damage, or regulatory consequences.”
The product deploys without friction, integrating natively into existing 1Kosmos workflows, identity stacks, and user experiences with no new licenses, retraining or rearchitecture.
Resemble AI heads straight to market with new funding
Resemble AI has raised 13 million dollars in strategic funding to accelerate development on its voice generation and deepfake detection products. An announcement says the investment round includes Google’s AI Future Fund, Okta Ventures, Taiwania Capital, Gentree Fund, IAG Capital Partners, Berkeley Frontier Fund and KDDI – partnerships, the firm says, that “create immediate paths to market distribution and embed our technology within key identity and security ecosystems.”
The company says its deepfake detection model achieves 98 percent accuracy across more than 40 languages with multimodal threat detection across audio, video, images and text, and enhanced explainability for content analysis. It intends to use the investment to “fuel our global expansion and accelerate the development of our AI detection platform.”
FARx releases new multimodal deepfake detection tool
FARx, which bills itself as “the world’s only fused-biometrics company,” has announced the launch of FARx 2.0, its new generation of biometric software which fuses speaker, speech and face recognition for added capabilities in synthetic and cloned voice detection. The software can be integrated into browsers, apps and communication systems, and operates in the background to provide continuous multi-factor authentication without disruption.
A post on the firm’s LinkedIn page says FARx 2.0 “identifies not just what is being said but who is speaking, enabling it to detect and block attempts to spoof someone’s identity using synthetic voices, deepfakes, or cloned audio and video.” Trained on some 55,000 synthetic voices from real telephony environments, it can “reliably distinguish between real and AI-generated voices.”
The Malvern Gazette quotes Clive Summerfield, CEO of the Worcestershire, UK-based firm, who says the new product aims to deliver “an even more sophisticated, flexible biometric multi-factor authentication technology to users across a broad range of industries and applications.”
“Legacy voice biometrics and traditional MFA systems are simply no longer enough to outsmart the new era of AI-powered threats.”
The launch follows a recent investment of 250,000 pounds (about US$337,00) through the Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (SEIS).
Grant funds deepfake tool tailored to South Korea, Singapore
A team from Singapore Management University (SMU) has won a grant to develop a deepfake detection tool. A release says the project will be “the first multilingual deepfake data set that includes dialectal variants such as Singlish and Korean dialects.”
“Many existing tools don’t perform well on Asian languages, accents, or content,” says Professor He Shengfeng, who leads the team. “We’re focused on building something that fits the specific needs of our region.”
Understanding different linguistic, socio-cultural and environmental characteristics was a key requirement for the grant, which comes from AI Singapore (AISG) and South Korea’s Institute for Information & Communication Technology Planning & Evaluation (IITP).
The team has dubbed its tool DeepShield, which its proposal paper calls “the first unified interpretable detection system capable of handling diverse and multi-modal manipulations – including object insertions, lighting alterations, background swaps, and voice dubbing – within a single, explainable pipeline.”
Overall, DeepShield wants to position itself as “not merely a detection tool, but a next-generation AI governance layer for digital media integrity – setting it apart from commercial offerings in both ambition and design.” The ultimate goal is a spin-off startup that He imagines licensing services such as deepfake forensics, media authenticity verification, enterprise compliance and digital governance to public and private enterprise.
Work commences in January 2026 with the scouring of large-scale, publicly available datasets such as the YouTube8M dataset.
Ant International’s winning deepfake detector looks to eliminate bias
Ant International has won first place at the NeurIPS Competition of Fairness in AI Face Detection. A release from the company says its entry trumped over 2,100 submissions from 162 teams globally.
The deepfake detection contest challenged participants to develop AI models that “not only achieve high-utility performance but also demonstrate fairness across demographic subgroups such as gender, age, and skin tone.”
“A biased AI is an insecure AI,” says Dr. Tianyi Zhang, general manager of risk management and cybersecurity at Ant International. “Our model’s fairness prevents exploitation from deepfakes and ensures reliable identity verification for all users, supporting our mission to deliver secure and inclusive financial services worldwide.”
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