The haystack problem
In remarks to SIFMA's Digital Assets Conference on 23 September 2026, US SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce questioned whether collecting ever more customer information is the best way to find financial crime. Large stores of sensitive records can themselves become targets. She raised privacy-preserving possibilities, including zero-knowledge proofs and attribute-based credentials. Those are ideas for consideration, not a change to US law or an endorsement of Onshorify.
Nigeria has its own version of this tension. Institutions must know their customers and keep records, while each extra copy of a name, NIN, BVN or account number adds another place that needs protecting. Our earlier analysis of reports about ₦250 identity records examines the risks around downstream verification access without claiming that NIMC's central database was breached. The question is not whether to stop lawful identity checks. It is whether every oversight feed needs another copy of raw identity data.
What Recommendation 29 actually asks for
FATF Recommendation 29 calls for a financial intelligence unit to receive and analyse disclosures and other relevant information, and to disseminate the results to competent authorities. It does not prescribe Onshorify, require a single national data lake, or remove any existing reporting duty. The NFIU must retain its own analytical judgment, legal powers and established reporting channels.
What would help is a dependable foundation beneath that work: a record of when an event was observed, which authorised source supplied it, which corridor it travelled through, and whether the record has been altered. That is the distinction between evidence that can be examined and intelligence that NFIU analysts produce from it.
A Nigerian engineering contribution, with honest boundaries
Onshorify's proposal is a sovereign financial transaction telemetry, evidence and intelligence-enablement layer. A source institution would keep raw identity attributes within its own boundary. A separately mirrored, minimised event would carry a timestamp, corridor and integrity information for authorised oversight. Institution-controlled signing can establish record authorship; HMAC can authenticate transport. Neither a signature nor a hash proves that a transaction is criminal.
Nor does a hash make privacy law disappear. A token that can be linked to a person may remain personal data under the NDPA 2023. Lawful basis, access controls, retention, oversight and a documented process for resolving a token back to an identity still matter. Different institutions cannot simply match institution-scoped tokens by wishful thinking: cross-institution correlation needs an agreed technical design, a lawful purpose and accountable approvals.
The practical test is a limited, clearly labelled sandbox: can authorised institutions mirror relevant events without slowing the production payment path, verify origin and detect missing records, and give NFIU analysts a more reliable starting point? The reference architecture is not a claim that national-scale ingestion, universal entity resolution or an automated intelligence engine already exists. It complements, rather than replaces, NFIU reporting and analytical systems.
The shield is a boundary, not a slogan
The same design question could matter to the CBN, SEC, NRS, NDPC and NIMC, each within its own mandate, and eventually to data-heavy public services such as customs, immigration and transport. These are potential applications, not partnerships, integrations or existing deployments. No agency should receive another agency's records merely because a diagram connects them. Authority, purpose and access must be settled first.
Commissioner Peirce's challenge is worth hearing from Nigeria: if we want a clearer signal, building a bigger haystack may be the wrong first move. Nigerian engineers can offer a careful alternative: keep identity with its custodian, preserve trustworthy event evidence, and let the authorised intelligence unit do the intelligence work. The next step is to test those boundaries, not to declare victory before the evidence exists.
Run the Onshorify diagnostic to examine your institution's current visibility and data-handling posture.