Your compliance data never leaves home.
Regence AI is building AI infrastructure for African banks that keeps sensitive data exactly where the law says it has to stay. We're early, and deliberately quiet about the details — but if you run compliance, risk, or technology at an African bank, we'd like to talk.
The law already decided this. Most vendors haven't caught up.
Ghana's Data Protection Act 2012, Nigeria's NDPR 2019, and Kenya's Data Protection Act 2019 all say the same thing in different words: classified financial data has to stay inside the country it came from.
Nearly every major AI compliance tool sends data abroad
The strongest compliance AI platforms on the market route classified banking data through servers in the United States, Europe, or China to process it. That single fact locks African banks out of tools their peers elsewhere already use — not because the tools are bad, but because using them would break the law.
The compliance workload keeps piling up
AML investigation queues run long. New regulatory circulars land every quarter. SME credit approvals can take weeks, mostly because someone still has to read the paperwork by hand. The tools that could help already exist. Where the data has to live is what keeps them out.
One rule the whole thing is built around: nothing crosses a border.
We're not publishing the architecture. What we will say is what it has to do — and what it refuses to do.
Runs where the data already lives
Deployed inside the bank's own infrastructure, inside its own country. Not a configuration option. A precondition.
Every answer traces to a real source
No response without a citation. If the system isn't confident, a person reviews it before it goes anywhere.
Built for examination, not just answers
Every interaction is logged, signed, and structured for the way regulators actually review evidence.
Full technical detail, benchmark results, and product architecture are shared under NDA with pilot partners and investors.
A small number of things, done properly
The full product roadmap covers several specialised capabilities across credit, compliance, trade, and reporting. Here's the shape of it, without the specifics.
Credit & Lending Intelligence
Faster, better-documented credit decisions, grounded in policy.
Compliance & Risk Monitoring
AML, KYC, and regulatory change, watched continuously.
Trade & Treasury
Cross-border and liquidity questions, answered against real rules.
Regulatory Reporting
Board and supervisory documentation, drafted and source-cited.
Full module breakdown, pricing, and pilot terms are shared directly with qualified banks and design partners.
Four things, in order of how much they matter
Sovereign by design
Runs on infrastructure the bank already owns, inside its own country. Not a feature. A precondition.
Trained on African regulation
Built on regulatory material from multiple African central banks and trade frameworks, not generic global training data.
Every answer accountable
Each response is traceable to its source. Anything uncertain routes to a human reviewer.
Built on real trade-finance experience
Grounded in prior integration work across dozens of African banks, not a theoretical model of how banking works.
Six things are lining up at the same time
None of this was true three years ago. All of it is true now.
CBN's AML mandate has a deadline
Nigerian banks now have until September 2027 to deploy AML monitoring that is explainable, human-supervised, and validated every year. BOG followed with its own AI policy framework in Q1 2026.
African sovereign AI infrastructure is real now
Cassava Technologies switched on Africa's first NVIDIA-powered AI Factory in Cape Town. Raxio Group passed $380M in committed capital across seven countries. Nxtra by Airtel Africa is building in Nairobi and Lagos.
PAPSS has reached real scale
The Pan-African Payment System now links over 190 commercial banks across 19 countries — and a ready distribution path for trade-finance compliance tools.
Big cloud tried the shortcut. It stalled.
A billion-dollar hyperscaler initiative in Kenya stalled when the government wouldn't commit to the computing purchases involved. Sovereign AI on the bank's own infrastructure doesn't have that dependency.
A $60B continental push
The Kigali Summit announced a $60 billion Africa AI Fund. The African Union's Continental AI Strategy and its Africa AI Council show this is continent-wide, not a one-country bet.
Open-source AI got cheap enough
Frontier-grade open-weight models became commercially licensable and affordable to run on-site. The economics of a sovereign build stopped being a theoretical argument.
An early, underserved market
Where this stands, and where it's going
We're early. Deliberately so — the plan is to get the foundation right with a small number of design-partner banks before expanding.
Foundation
A small set of pilot banks in West Africa. Core capability live and under active testing. Regulatory sandbox engagement underway.
Full Platform
Complete capability set live. Deployment options expand to match how partner banks already run their infrastructure.
Continental Scale
Expansion across additional African markets through banking-group and payment-network partnerships.
Built out of the compliance work itself
Abayomi Mobolaji Onibudo
FounderRegence AI grew out of direct work on cross-border payment integration across dozens of African banks — and out of watching compliance teams lose hours to paperwork that AI could help with, if it were legally allowed to run where the data lives.
Anchor sponsor: Leapsoft Consulting Ltd
Regence AI Limited is currently completing incorporation. Until that process is complete, the venture operates under the sponsorship of Leapsoft Consulting Ltd, a Lagos-based technology and infrastructure firm.
Banks, investors, and partners — we'd like to hear from you.
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