Safeguarding Stability, Public Awareness, and Crisis Readiness for a Stronger Future

Keynote address by Eva Hüpkes, IADI Secretary General at the Africa Regional Committee Annual Meeting and Workshop

Abuja 21 July 2026

Distinguished Members of the National Assembly,

The Honourable Minister of Finance,

The Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria,

The Chairman and Board of Directors of the Nigeria Deposit Insurance Corporation,

The Chairperson of the IADI Africa Regional Committee,

Heads of Deposit Insurers,

Distinguished Colleagues, Ladies and Gentlemen,

It is a great pleasure to be with you today at this Africa Regional Committee meeting. My warm thanks to our gracious host, to the Chair of the Africa Regional Committee, and to all who have travelled from across the continent and beyond to be here in Abuja.

Abuja was built at the geographic centre of Nigeria as the country’s Centre of Unity. Above it rises Aso Rock, a six-hundred-million-year-old granite monolith whose name, in the language of the people on whose land it stands, means victorious. There is something very fitting in meeting here. The financial safety net itself, of which deposit insurance is one pillar, is itself an exercise in unity. No single pillar, not the supervisor, not the resolution authority, not the deposit insurer, not the central bank, can secure it alone. Its purpose is stability, it is to give depositors, and the system that depends on their confidence, something that will not move like the Aso Rock that has not moved for six hundred million years.

Let me open by recognising the leadership this region has shown in deposit insurance in recent years. At no time, there have been more deposit insurers in Africa. That leadership matters at a moment when our financial systems are undergoing profound change and the digital transformation of money is testing the perimeter of what we protect.

Our meeting this week is framed around three headings: safeguarding stability, public awareness, and crisis readiness. I want to take each in turn, and say what it means for the deposit-insurance community in this changing environment, and what it means for this region in particular.

Safeguarding stability

The first theme is safeguarding stability, the financial-stability rationale of what we do.

It is sometimes said that deposit insurance is about protecting individual depositors. That is true, but it is not the whole truth.

Deposit insurance is, in the first instance, a financial-stability instrument. Its primary contribution is ex ante: by giving credible protection to insured depositors at all times, it reduces the probability that doubt about a single institution will turn into a run, and it prevents idiosyncratic stress from escalating into systemic stress. The depositor benefits; but the system benefits even more.

Resolution operates on both sides of failure. Ex ante it imposes discipline on banks before any failure occurs, ex post when a bank does fail, the resolution authority allocates losses, preserves critical functions and thereby limits contagion. Resolution and deposit insurance are therefore not substitutes; they are complements, each doing part of its work before and failure and part after.

The 2025 revision of the IADI Core Principles recognises that interdependence in that it stresses the importance of the deposit insurance function working as part of an integrated safety net alongside prudential supervision, resolution and the lender of last resort.

Public awareness

The second theme is public awareness. If deposit insurance is to do its stabilising work, depositors must believe in it. That belief depends on two things: that the protection actually exists when needed, and that depositors know, clearly and in advance, what is insured and what is not.

This second condition is harder to meet than it sounds, and it is becoming harder still. The African digital perimeter is more diverse than any other region’s In some jurisdictions, deposit insurers offer pass-through coverage, offering protection for each individual subscriber rather than the issuer’s pooled account. Elsewhere, coverage applies only at the float account level, and in a few cases, mobile money is treated as a deposit. These differences matter. Pass-through coverage provides greater protection against the failure of the bank holding the float but does not shield users from the failure of the e-money issuer. Only the direct approach, treating e-money as a deposit, offers that level of security. I encourage you all to engage with IADI recently published Policy Options for E-Money and Deposit Insurance which contains practical guidance. Its central finding is that there is no single solution that fits all: the appropriate choice depends on the characteristics of the local e-money market.

Regardless of the model, clear and transparent communication is essential. Stakeholders must understand what is covered, to what extent, and under what conditions. But communication alone is insufficient. Deposit insurers must have the financial and operational capacity to deliver on their promises. For each approach other than the default, the deposit insurer must have the legal and operational capacity to obtain accurate, current data on who the e-money users are, whether they are eligible, and what their balances are, and that data sits with the issuer, not with the bank. Without that, pass-through or direct coverage becomes a promise that cannot be fulfilled.

The 2025 revision of the Core Principles responds to the evolving deposit-taking landscape by refining Principle 7 on mandatory membership, moving from an institutional to a functional definition of the perimeter. That functional approach accommodates institutions that are not strictly banks and, where supported by a clear policy rationale, may encompass tokenised deposits, certain non-bank deposit-takers and other digital deposit-like products.

Getting public communication on coverage right is critical for financial-stability. The FDIC’s post-mortem of the 2023 turmoil found that passive escrow accounts, which were assumed to be fully insured through pass-through deposit insurance arrangements, experienced significant outflows. One possible explanation for that is limited understanding of how the mechanism would operate in practice. By contrast, retail depositors, covered directly up to the standard deposit insurance limit proved to be more stable, where coverage was clear and readily understood.

These scenarios may be similar to those that stablecoins and other deposit-like instruments will increasingly pose for us. The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in its Annual Economic Report 2026 (Chapter III) made clear that trust is the foundation of money and that the two-tier system that pairs central-bank money with regulated private intermediation has delivered that trust for decades. The BIS characterises stablecoins as run-prone instruments outside the bank perimeter. For deposit insurers, this reinforces the importance of ensuring that the public clearly understands how stablecoins differ from deposits and to communicate the distinction: what is insured and when; what is not. This is an important financial-stability variable.

Crisis readiness

The third theme is crisis readiness. Depositors now expect access to their money around the clock, and technology increasingly delivers it, so funds can leave at any hour. The world in which a major banking institution can lose 20 per cent of its deposits in a single day is the world we now live in. Technological innovation may have an impact on the depositors’ behaviour. And the trigger for the next crisis may be a cyber incident rather than a credit event.

The 2025 IADI Core Principles revision responds on three fronts. It introduces a new Principle 4 that makes business-continuity and cyber resilience of the deposit insurer a requirement in its own right. It strengthens the Principles on cooperation, elevating what was previously a general expectation of information sharing amongst financial safety-net participants into a requirement of formal coordination arrangements, joint testing, decision-making and coordinated communications. And it sets as a baseline an Essential Criterion of seven working days for reimbursement, with an Additional Criterion of three days as an ambition for those deposit insurance systems ready to reach it.

Crisis readiness in the current environment requires:.

• operational capability, the single customer view data, the systems, and the access to payment infrastructure to identify insured depositors, calculate coverage and effect rapid reimbursement.
• cyber resilience: cyber-attacks on insured deposit taking institutions, on payment infrastructures and on the deposit insurer itself have moved from a residual concern to a financial-stability risk. AI-driven misinformation and the next generation of autonomous agents can become tools by which runs can be coordinated and executed.
• cooperation: Memoranda of Understanding, joint playbooks, pre-positioned communications protocols and routine joint simulations among the deposit insurer, the central bank, the supervisor and the resolution authority are no longer aspirational. The simulations several of you are now running, including the West African Monetary Union (WAMU) exercise we will hear about at the conference are the way to prepare.

The African dimension and the forward agenda

What does this mean for the African region specifically? This region is at the frontier of several of the challenges the deposit-insurance community is facing. Sub-Saharan Africa hosts roughly 1.1 billion registered mobile-money accounts, more than half of the global total. It accounts for approximately two-thirds of global mobile-money transaction value, with regional flows of roughly USD 1.4 trillion in 2025. Account ownership has risen to 58 per cent of adults in Sub-Saharan Africa, with mobile-money ownership at 40 per cent, the highest of any region in the world.

Earlier this month, IADI published its report on the Impact of Financial Innovation and Digitalisation on Deposit Insurance Systems. It is a first comprehensive IADI study of how digitalisation is reshaping the definition and role of deposits and the work of deposit insurers worldwide. It sets out three findings.

• First, on the digital products at the perimeter of deposit insurance: e-money, stablecoins, tokenised deposits and central bank digital currencies are evolving rapidly and unevenly across jurisdictions, and they blur the boundaries of conventional deposit-taking. The 2025 Core Principles respond by defining insured deposit-takers by what they do rather than by what they are called.
• Second, on new market entrants and changing depositor behaviour: banking-as-a-service arrangements, deposit-placement platforms and embedded finance reach customers through models the original deposit-insurance framework did not anticipate. And depositors themselves have changed. They demand instant access, they diversify across providers, and they react through digital channels within hours.
• Third, on technology: automation, artificial intelligence and cloud computing offer real opportunities in premium assessment, risk monitoring and reimbursement, and equally real exposures in operational risk, vendor concentration and cybersecurity. Quantum computing, on the longer horizon, offers analytical opportunity while posing a real threat to current encryption standards.

The forward agenda that follows from these findings stresses the need for continued monitoring of markets and regulatory developments; clarifying and operationalising coverage; public awareness and communication; collaboration and coordination with other financial safety net participants and stakeholders; and operational resilience and technological capability.

Closing

Let me conclude: the three themes of this conference are three faces of the same responsibility. Financial stability is preserved when public awareness is high and crisis readiness is in place. Awareness is sustained when coverage is credible, operational, and the financial safety net is well coordinated. Readiness is built when the deposit insurer, working with its safety net partners, has the operational capability, the cyber resilience and the cooperation arrangements to act at the speed the digital age now requires.

Abuja brings constituencies together from across Nigeria, at the foot of an Aso Rock that has stood unmoved for six hundred million years. That is a fitting image for what we do. The work of building unity and stability into the international deposit-insurance architecture is the work of IADI, and it is work I am very glad to be doing with you.

References

• Bank for International Settlements, Annual Economic Report 2026 (BIS, 28 June 2026), Chapter III (Anchoring Trust in Money: Innovation beyond Stablecoins).
• Chu, Karyen and others, Dissecting Depositor Flight: An Analysis of the Spring 2023 Bank Failures (FDIC Staff Studies, May 2026).
• Financial Stability Board, Depositor Behaviour and Interest Rate and Liquidity Risks in the Financial System: Lessons from the March 2023 Banking Turmoil (FSB, 16 October 2024).
• GSMA, State of the Industry Report on Mobile Money 2025 (GSMA, April 2025).
• International Association of Deposit Insurers, Core Principles for Effective Deposit Insurance Systems (IADI, September 2025).
• International Association of Deposit Insurers, Financial Innovation and Digitalisation: Impact on Deposit Insurance Systems (IADI, 2026).
• International Association of Deposit Insurers, Policy Options for E-Money and Deposit Insurance (IADI Policy Paper, 23 February 2026).
• Nigeria Deposit Insurance Corporation, Framework for the Establishment of Pass-Through Deposit Insurance for Subscribers of Mobile Money Operators in Nigeria (NDIC, 2020);
• NDIC, NDIC Increases Maximum Deposit Insurance Coverage for Bank Depositors (April 2024).
• World Bank, The Global Findex Database 2025 (World Bank, July 2025).