Every year, roughly 3.5 million young Nigerians step into a job market shaped almost entirely by technology. Half the country is under 30. That single fact, more than any policy paper or tech conference buzzword, is why Dr Stanley Jacob, President of FintechNGR, delivered a warning in Lagos this week that businesses can’t afford to shrug off: adapt digitally, or become irrelevant.
Speaking at the maiden Nigerian-British Chamber of Commerce (NBCC) Business Innovation Series, Jacob, who also serves as Group Chief Innovation and Technology Officer at Meristem, put it plainly. “Digitisation is no longer optional; it is the minimum requirement for relevance,” he said.
This isn’t a tidy line for a keynote slide. It’s a direct challenge to Nigerian company boards still treating digital transformation as an IT department errand rather than a survival strategy.
The Human Stakes Behind the Statistics
It’s easy to hear “digitisation” and think spreadsheets, apps, and back-office upgrades. But Jacob’s framing is about people first. With Nigeria’s population skewing so young, and millions entering the workforce annually expecting digital-first employers, businesses that lag technologically aren’t just losing efficiency, they’re losing the very talent and customers who will define the next decade of the economy.
Jacob argued that the divide between digitally native companies and legacy enterprises “had become a survival challenge rather than merely a technology issue,” a reframing that should worry any executive still debating whether digital transformation deserves boardroom time.
Why Digitisation for Business Survival Isn’t Optional Anymore
The numbers Jacob shared aren’t abstract. UK-Nigeria bilateral trade has hit about £8.1 billion annually, with digital and technology services increasingly driving that growth. Nigerian fintech names like LemFi, Moniepoint, and Kuda Bank are actively expanding into the UK market, while British fintech giant Wise has secured its first Nigerian licence, a rare two-way flow that shows digitisation isn’t just something Nigeria imports, it’s something Nigeria now exports.
Add to that the UK Export Finance’s £746 million commitment to modernise the Apapa and Tin Can ports, and Airtel Africa’s 80-million-dollar Lagos data centre investment, and a clear picture forms: the infrastructure for digitisation for business survival is being built right now, with or without individual companies on board.
The Uncomfortable Truth: Most Digital Efforts Fail Anyway
Here’s where Jacob’s speech gets its edge. He didn’t just cheerlead technology, he warned that between 70 and 80 percent of digital transformation initiatives fail, largely because companies treat them as IT projects instead of enterprise-wide business transformations. Digital skills shortages and weak governance, he said, remain the biggest obstacles, especially for African businesses.
That’s a sharp point worth sitting with: throwing money at software or apps without rethinking leadership, data governance, and cybersecurity as board-level responsibilities is close to guaranteed failure. Jacob named regulatory clarity, infrastructure investment, and talent development as the three pillars that actually determine whether digitisation sticks, citing the Central Bank of Nigeria’s Open Banking framework and the Federal Government’s Three Million Technical Talent Programme as steps in the right direction.
Take a Side or Get Left Behind
Awa Ekekwe, Chief Operating Officer of Risevest, who also spoke at the event, added a grounding note: technology is only as strong as the people and governance behind it. “The muscle of businesses in this time and age are still the people while your processes and governance structures are the foundation which you then leverage technology on,”he said.
That’s the real argument here, and Glostarep is taking a side on it: digitisation for business survival isn’t a “nice to have” checkbox for Nigerian companies chasing trend headlines, it’s now the baseline cost of staying in business. Companies that keep debating whether to digitise are, functionally, choosing to lose ground to competitors who already have.
So here’s the question worth putting to every Nigerian business leader reading this: if 3.5 million digitally fluent young people are entering the workforce every year, and 70–80 percent of digital transformation projects still fail, is your business actually building for that future, or just hoping it arrives slowly enough to keep up?
