CSCS T+1 settlement cycle, CBN OMO, FGN Lists Additional FGN Bonds, A Trailing Slash Bypassed AWS API Authorization

The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), led by Governor Olayemi Cardoso, launched the Nigeria Payment System Vision (PSV) 2028 in Abuja, a three-year roadmap to bring 50 million more Nigerians into the formal financial system and reach 95% adult financial inclusion by 2028.

Key targets include reducing cash outside the banking system to below 40% of currency in circulation, deploying over 10 million QR-code and tap-to-pay acceptance points nationwide, cutting fraud losses to under 0.001% of total transactions using AI and advanced identity verification, and expanding open banking through more than 100 licensed APIs already available to developers.

The roadmap explicitly targets underserved groups, market women, farmers, traders, and young entrepreneurs and aims to position Nigeria as Africa's leading payments hub, including enabling faster cross-border transactions under the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) framework.

Shareholders of First HoldCo Plc, parent of FirstBank of Nigeria, approved a N253.099 billion capital raise at the company's 14th Annual General Meeting held virtually on May 29, 2026.

The raise targets N1 trillion in paid-up capital (share capital plus share premium), double the Central Bank of Nigeria's N500 billion minimum requirement for internationally authorised banks; it may be executed via public offering, private placement, rights issue, bonus issues, scrip dividend, or other equity instruments on the Nigerian Exchange (NGX) or international markets.

First HoldCo recorded a N826.3 billion impairment charge in 2025, reducing net profit to N147.3 billion, but rebounded strongly in Q1 2026 with profit before tax of N321.1 billion, a 72.2% year-on-year increase, signalling recovery after a major balance sheet clean-up that included a completed N45 billion private placement in March 2026 and the divestment of merchant banking subsidiary FBNQuest.

The Federal Government listed additional units of two FGN Bonds on the Nigerian Exchange Limited (NGX) on May 29, 2026, following the Debt Management Office's (DMO) May 2026 bond auction.

The 16.2499% FGN APR 2037 Bond gained 476,837,529 new units, bringing its total to 2,273,491,074 units; the 22.60% FGN JAN 2035 Bond gained 137,674,284 units, raising its total to 1,287,383,553 units.

The DMO used a bond reopening strategy, adding to existing instruments rather than issuing new ones, to improve liquidity, deepen secondary market trading, and create larger benchmark securities attractive to pension funds, asset managers, and insurance firms.

The Central Securities Clearing System (CSCS) Plc officially launched Nigeria's T+1 settlement cycle on Monday, June 1, meaning securities trades now settle the next business day instead of two days after execution.

The shift reduces settlement risk, improves liquidity, and accelerates capital recycling. Sellers receive proceeds the next business day, and buyers are debited within the same timeframe, according to NGX Group Chairman Dr. Umaru Kwairanga.

NGX Group CEO Temi Popoola said T+1 supports a broader strategy including larger listings, digital assets, and expanded fixed-income market participation, with industry participants already eyeing eventual same-day settlement.

The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) withdrew N7.303 trillion and injected N5.734 trillion between May 7 and May 29, 2026, producing a net liquidity drain of N1.569 trillion across 14 trading days.

The single largest operation was a N3.692 trillion Open Market Operations (OMO) auction on May 21, where the CBN accepted all subscriptions across two bill tenors, a 33-day and a 138-day bill, accounting for more than half of total monthly OMO sales.

Cumulative OMO sales from January to April 2026 had already reached approximately N30.12 trillion, and with N2.04 trillion in maturing OMO bills expected to re-enter the system in the first week of June, the CBN is likely to face renewed pressure to conduct further mop-up operations.

South African retail giant Pick n Pay confirmed a cyberattack that exposed customer data, including names, contact details, delivery addresses, and limited payment card information, from a retired on-demand delivery app formerly known as Bottles, later rebranded as Pick n Pay Asap!

Customers who registered for the delivery service on or before 2022 may have been impacted; Pick n Pay began notifying affected customers on May 30 and says full card numbers and CVV codes were not stored on the compromised system.

Cybersecurity experts and data governance specialists say the breach stems not from a sophisticated hack but from a failure to delete or properly secure customer records after the platform was retired, a problem the company's own executive acknowledged, saying a broader review of historical data management practices is now underway.

South Africa's Information Regulator has urged affected consumers to file complaints and called on Pick n Pay to formally report the incident; the company says it has already initiated that notification process.

Anthropic has launched Dynamic Workflows for Claude Code, enabling the AI to automatically create and coordinate large numbers of specialised agents within a single workflow to handle complex software engineering tasks.

The feature is available in research preview on Max, Team, and eligible Enterprise plans, plus via the Claude API and platforms including Amazon Bedrock, Google Vertex AI, and Microsoft Foundry, but Anthropic warns it can consume substantially more tokens than a standard Claude Code session, recommending users start with smaller, well-scoped tasks.

Security researcher Piyush Gupta discovered that adding a trailing slash to API paths on AWS HTTP API Gateway completely bypasses Lambda authorizer authentication, meaning GET /v1/accounts/ returned full account data where GET /v1/accounts returned a 401 error.

The root cause is a mismatch between two independent layers: the route matching layer and the authorizer layer disagree on what constitutes a valid path match, causing the user identity context to be dropped and the backend to default to a system account returning all data.

A fintech company affected by this vulnerability fixed it the next day by switching from HTTP API to REST API, which has stricter path matching and adding independent user ID validation inside every Lambda function rather than relying solely on the authorizer.

Recommended immediate actions for any team using AWS HTTP API with Lambda authorizers: audit trailing-slash variants of protected routes, validate authorization context fields inside backend Lambda functions independently, and evaluate switching to REST API for security-sensitive endpoints.

Pan-African startup Koolboks, founded in 2018 by Ayoola Dominic and Deborah Gael, designs and distributes solar-powered refrigerators and freezers for off-grid and weak-grid communities, primarily serving small businesses and healthcare facilities.

Units run entirely on solar energy with integrated lithium-ion batteries providing 24/7 refrigeration; customers access them via pay-as-you-go (PAYG) financing, a small upfront payment repaid weekly or monthly through mobile money, with full ownership after 12–24 months. Over 10,000 units have been deployed across Nigeria, Kenya, and Uganda since 2021.

Koolboks closed an US$11 million Series A round last September, bringing total funding to approximately US$15.4 million. Revenue comes from hardware sales, PAYG financing interest, and its Koolbuy BNPL platform that finances third-party appliance brands. Expansion into Mozambique and Ghana is planned within the next 12–18 months.

Safaricom (M-PESA) and Visa have warned Kenya's Parliament that the Finance Bill 2026, which proposes a 16% VAT on digital payment platforms on top of an existing 15% excise duty, could push the effective tax burden on mobile money transactions from 15% to 33.4%, raising fees for Kenya's 51 million mobile money users by up to 18.4%.

M-PESA moved KES 41.68 trillion (USD 323 billion) last financial year, with active merchants growing 71% to 3.1 million. A tax-driven cost increase threatens to reverse Kenya's status as a global mobile money leader and could push users back to cash, shrinking the very tax base the government aims to expand.

The Kenya Bankers Association (KBA) has formally opposed the bill, warning that compounding levies could push total digital financial transaction costs from 15% to 58.4%; Visa's modelling shows merchants on a KES 10,000 card purchase would lose an additional KES 32 per transaction if the bill passes unchanged.

Pension Fund Administrators (PFAs) managing Nigeria's Contributory Pension Scheme saw total assets rise by approximately ₦1.42 trillion in April 2026, pushing the industry total to about ₦30.94 trillion.

Growth was driven by fresh retirement contributions, investment income, and strong performance in equities and government securities, with Federal Government bonds remaining the dominant asset class for pension portfolios.

Rising compliance with contribution requirements under the Pension Reform Act is expanding the pool of active contributors, while fund managers are navigating elevated interest rates to balance capital preservation with competitive returns.

Shopify built a new internal GraphQL execution engine called GraphQL Cardinal that switches from the traditional depth-first query traversal to a breadth-first model, processing queries level by level across groups of entities rather than object by object.

In production, the new engine delivered 15x faster field-level execution, 6x less garbage collection overhead, and cut more than 4 seconds off median end-to-end response time for large GraphQL list queries.

The migration preserved full compatibility with existing GraphQL schemas and APIs, meaning Shopify's engineering teams gained the performance benefits without rewriting application-level queries, a significant practical achievement given the scale of Shopify's infrastructure.

Nigeria imported £1.1 billion worth of refined oil from the United Kingdom in the 12 months to December 2025, a 9.4% increase year-on-year, according to the UK Department for Business and Trade's Trade and Investment Factsheet.

Refined oil accounted for 60.5% of all UK goods exported to Nigeria, more than the next four export categories combined, exposing Nigeria's continued dependence on imported petroleum products despite the Dangote Petroleum Refinery and state refinery rehabilitation efforts.

Total UK-Nigeria trade in goods and services reached £7.6 billion in 2025, up 10.8% from 2024, with the UK recording a £3.3 billion trade surplus; UK exports to Nigeria rose to £5.5 billion while Nigerian exports to the UK reached £2.1 billion.

The Federal Government of Nigeria spent N12.52 trillion on debt servicing between January and September 2025, consuming 67.22% of total retained revenue, meaning N67 of every N100 earned went to repaying debt obligations.

Nigeria's total public debt stock stood at N153.29 trillion as of September 2025, with domestic debt accounting for 53.37% and external debt at 46.63%, while total government spending of N8.03 trillion in Q3 was 41.57% below the prorated budget of N13.75 trillion.

The Budget Office stated that Nigeria's core fiscal challenge is revenue generation rather than debt sustainability alone, and warned that debt servicing will remain a major pressure point unless revenue generation improves significantly.

President Ruto committed Sh200mn over two years to Rhino Ark's Endowment Fund, targeting the protection of Kenya's mountain forest Water Towers, including the Aberdare Range, Mount Kenya, Mau Forest, and Kakamega Forest.

The 2025 Rhino Charge event in Wamba, Samburu County, raised Sh365.4mn, nearly double last year's total, with 65 off-road vehicles competing across harsh terrain at Ngilai Wildlife Community Conservancy.

Since its founding 37 years ago, Rhino Charge has raised over Sh2.7bn for ecosystem conservation; Ruto cited the economic value of Kenya's montane forests at Sh611bn annually to agriculture, energy, and manufacturing.

GCR Ratings affirmed Access Bank's national scale long-term and short-term issuer ratings at AA(NG) and A1+(NG) respectively, maintaining a stable outlook based on the bank's scale, trade finance capabilities, and funding strength.

Access Bank cut its interbank deposit reliance by 59.9 percent to N3.7 trillion during the 2025 financial year, deliberately shifting toward customer deposits for a more stable and lower-cost funding base; market funding now accounts for less than 3 percent of customer deposits.

Impairment charges more than doubled to N523.5 billion in 2025 from N245.3 billion the prior year, following the end of regulatory forbearance, though the bank's non-performing loan ratio remained modest at 3.0 percent as of December 2025, within a three-year range below 3.5 percent.

NNPC Ltd. posted N4.97 trillion in revenue for April 2026, a 79% month-on-month increase from N2.77 trillion in March, with profit after tax rising to N481 billion from N276 billion.

Crude oil and condensate production climbed to 1.68 million barrels per day in April from 1.56 million in March, driven by improved pipeline availability, security interventions, and better coordination across joint venture arrangements.

The company's Gas Master Plan 2026 targets daily gas production of 10 billion cubic feet and aims to expand Nigeria's gas reserves from approximately 210 trillion cubic feet to 600 trillion cubic feet as part of a long-term energy strategy.

PayAngel, a migrant-focused cross-border payments platform, has expanded its collaboration with Visa using Currencycloud, a Visa Direct solution, to strengthen multicurrency account and international payout capabilities.

The platform now supports fee-free transfers and competitive FX rates across 22 African countries, as well as India and Bangladesh, with a B2B payments portal enabling collections, disbursements, and cross-border settlements without requiring local presence.

Directors, employees, and related parties of VFD Group Plc collectively acquired approximately 20.5 million ordinary shares across about 40 trade deals, with prices ranging from N10.35 to N10.70 per share, all disclosed in compliance with Nigerian Exchange (NGX) insider trading guidelines.

The purchases were made between late April and mid-May 2026, timed ahead of the May 4 dividend qualification date and the 10th AGM scheduled for May 25, 2026, where a 25 kobo per share final dividend is expected to be paid, suggesting insiders were positioning to capture the dividend.

VFD Group reported a pretax profit of N14.1 billion for FY 2025 on gross earnings of N88.35 billion, a 13.2% year-on-year increase with total assets surging to N445.8 billion from N295.6 billion, while the stock closed at N10.10 on May 22, 2026, down 8.18% from its year-opening price of N11.00.