BEYOND GLOBAL STANDARDS: A STRATEGIC BUSINESS CONTINUITY AND DISASTER RECOVERY (BCDR) FOR THE NIGERIA FINANCIAL SERVICES

The sustenance of the global economy hinges on the ability of developing nations to maintain the stability of the banking systems in their countries. There are globally accepted Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) and planning systems, but in Nigeria, the effectiveness of such systems is greatly reduced in the light of the peculiar convergence of severe localized risks and systemic weaknesses. The present contribution, then, is the result of a systematic review involving ten selected journals and a strategic gap analysis, to develop a customized BCDR for the Nigerian Financial Services Sector. The review found the following three most important gaps: (1) Lack of specificity to the cyber (fraud) architecture in the sub-region which is particularly susceptible to financial fraud interdiction and advanced social-engineering scams. (2) Lack of coherent models for recovery with the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and reputational losses, regulatory compliance, and other model recoveries interwoven. (3) A strong need to localize the metrics, such as Customer Accessibility, Recovery Time Objective, and other indicators of success, which are global to infrastructure realities (e.g., grid instability, fiber vulnerability). The suggested Strategic Roadmap is built on three focused pillars (Secure, Adapt, and Measure), aiming at assisting financial entities to obtain a resilience framework that incorporates technology with sustainability. The framework focuses on delivering more than just uptime; it aims to provide uninterrupted customer access, regulatory provision, and operational trust. It will facilitate advanced work on resilience computational models with multiple recovery levels, predictive risk models, and other AI-based perturbation models meant for developing economies.