Across African markets, a shift is underway in how organisations approach IT asset management. Having acknowledged the scale of the visibility gap – the growing disconnect between what appears on balance sheets and what can be verified in the real world – finance and IT teams are now moving to close it. The conversation, once dominated by problem definition, is rapidly becoming one of implementation.

This shift follows a period of heightened scrutiny in which organisations have begun to quantify the financial impact of poor asset visibility: avoidable procurement spend on devices that already exist in their estates, capital tied up in assets that are no longer in productive use, audit exposure from inaccurate registers, and security risk created by devices that have drifted off the network without formal decommissioning.

“We are seeing a clear change in the nature of the conversations organisations are having with us,” said Valene Nagiah, Head of Asset Tracking and Management at V-Track. “Twelve months ago, the primary question was: do we have a problem? Now, the question is: how do we fix it  and how quickly can we demonstrate a return? That is a meaningful shift, and it reflects a broader maturation in how African businesses think about IT governance.”

From static registers to continuous control

For many organisations, the first step in closing the visibility gap has been confronting the inadequacy of existing systems. Periodic manual audits and static spreadsheet-based asset registers are the default approach across much of the continent and are increasingly being recognised for what they are: point-in-time snapshots that begin losing accuracy the moment they are completed.

In environments where assets move constantly between offices, remote locations, field teams, and employees who may work across multiple sites,  a register that is accurate today may be significantly out of date within weeks. The challenge is not simply one of data quality; it is structural. Manual processes cannot keep pace with the operational reality of a distributed, mobile workforce.

“The organisations making the most progress are those that have stopped treating asset management as an audit exercise and started treating it as a continuous function,” said Nagiah. “Visibility is not something you achieve once a year. It is something you maintain every day and that requires infrastructure, not just process.”

The hybrid workforce as a forcing function

The permanent entrenchment of hybrid and distributed working across African markets has proven to be a significant forcing function for ITAM investment. As organisations formalised remote and flexible work arrangements, the practical consequences of asset invisibility became harder to ignore. Devices issued to home-based employees, contractors, and field staff could no longer be assumed to be present, functional, or secure, and without tracking infrastructure, verifying their status required manual intervention that was neither scalable nor reliable.

In markets characterised by infrastructure variability, including intermittent power supply, inconsistent connectivity, and high rates of staff movement between employers, these challenges are amplified. A device that was verified last quarter may have changed location, changed hands, or gone offline entirely in the intervening period. Without continuous monitoring, the organisation simply does not know.

For leased IT environments, this dynamic carries additional financial weight. Devices that cannot be accounted for at the end of a lease agreement represent a direct liability, replacement costs that fall to the organisation, compounded by the administrative burden of attempting to recover assets after the fact. Proactive tracking eliminates this exposure before it materialises.

What effective implementation looks like

Organisations that have made meaningful progress on IT asset visibility share a common set of characteristics. They have moved away from treating ITAM as a back-office IT function and repositioned it as a financial control mechanism with direct implications for procurement strategy, capital allocation, and audit readiness. They have invested in platforms that provide continuous, real-time data rather than periodic snapshots. And they have created clear ownership of asset data at both the IT and finance level, recognising that the two functions need to operate from the same source of truth.

The practical benefits of this approach are demonstrable across four areas:

• Financial accuracy: asset registers that reflect operational reality, enabling more precise depreciation, budgeting, and capital planning.
• Procurement efficiency: elimination of duplicate or unnecessary purchases driven by inaccurate inventory data.
• Security and compliance: continuous visibility into device status reduces the attack surface created by unmonitored endpoints and strengthens regulatory compliance.
• Lease and lifecycle management: accurate, real-time asset data enables organisations to optimise lease terms, plan timely returns, and maximise residual value.

“The organisations that are getting this right are not necessarily those with the largest IT budgets,” Nagiah noted. “They are the ones that have made a deliberate decision to treat their asset estate as a managed financial resource and have put the systems in place to support that decision. The technology to do this exists, and it is accessible. The gap is no longer a technology gap. It is a decision gap.”

A platform built for African operating conditions

V-Track’s asset intelligence platform is designed to function effectively within the operational constraints that characterise many African business environments. The platform requires no on-premises infrastructure, operates across distributed and multi-jurisdiction environments, and provides finance and IT teams with a unified view of their asset estate regardless of where those assets are physically located.

Organisations yet to begin their asset visibility journey are encouraged to start with V-Track’s 15-day free trial (https://apo-opa.co/4ehmGXN) – a structured visibility audit that typically surfaces actionable findings within the first week. No procurement process, no long-form commitment, and no prior ITAM infrastructure required.

“The most common thing we hear after the trial is: we had no idea,” said Nagiah. “That is exactly the point. The trial does not sell a product – it reveals a reality. What organisations choose to do with that clarity is their decision. But they can no longer say they did not know.”

What makes that trajectory especially significant for investors is not just population size, but the age and digital profile of that population. Nigeria remains one of the youngest countries globally, with a median age of around 18, while internet penetration has surpassed 50%, creating a rapidly expanding base of mobile-first consumers entering the digital economy each year.

This dynamic is fundamentally reshaping the long-term case for digital infrastructure investment. Investors are positioning for what Nigeria could become over the next two decades: one of the world’s largest digital populations, with rising demand for cloud computing, AI-enabled services, fintech platforms, streaming content, enterprise software and sovereign data storage.

This shift is already shaping how the industry is thinking about digital infrastructure across the continent. At African Energy Week 2026 – the continent’s premier energy event – the introduction of an AI and Data Center track – Renegade Intel – reflects growing recognition that data infrastructure is becoming as critical as energy infrastructure to Africa’s economic future. In markets like Nigeria, where population growth is rapidly translating into digital demand, that intersection is now central to long-term investment planning.

Nigeria’s data center market, valued at roughly $288 million in 2025, is projected to surpass $1 billion by 2031, with operators rapidly expanding colocation and cloud capacity in Lagos and other urban hubs. Major players including Equinix, MTN, Rack Center and Open Access Data Centers are scaling infrastructure to capture what they see as long-term structural growth rather than a short-term market cycle.

In 2025, MTN announced a more than $240 million investment into a new Lagos data facility designed to support AI and cloud demand, underscoring how operators are preparing for far larger digital workloads in the years ahead. Recent reports suggest nearly $1 billion in broader data center investments flowing into Nigeria as companies race to expand cloud and AI infrastructure capacity.

Much of that optimism rests on the belief that Nigeria’s digital consumption curve is still in its early stages. Fintech adoption continues to accelerate across the country, streaming platforms are expanding local content distribution, and enterprise cloud migration remains relatively underpenetrated compared to more mature markets. At the same time, artificial intelligence is expected to dramatically increase computing and storage requirements globally, creating additional incentives to localize infrastructure closer to end users.

For Nigeria, data localization and sovereign storage are becoming increasingly strategic as governments and businesses seek greater control over where critical information is processed and stored. Building data centers locally is now seen as essential for data control, security and long-term economic growth.

Still, the opportunity comes with its challenges. Reliable electricity supply remains one of the biggest constraints on large-scale data center expansion in Nigeria, where operators often rely heavily on backup generation and hybrid power systems. Connectivity improvements, regulatory clarity and long-term energy availability will all play a critical role in determining how quickly infrastructure deployment can scale.

“Data centers are becoming critical infrastructure for Africa’s economic future, but none of this growth happens without energy,” says NJ Ayuk, Executive Chairman of the African Energy Chamber. “Countries like Nigeria are seeing rising demand because of demographics, connectivity and digital adoption, but investors also need confidence that long-term power supply can support that expansion.”

Nigeria’s population growth alone does not guarantee digital infrastructure success. But when combined with rising internet penetration, fintech adoption, cloud usage and AI-driven computing demand, it creates a scale opportunity few emerging markets can match. Investors are looking beyond today’s market to the scale Nigeria’s digital economy could reach.

Distributed by APO Group on behalf of African Energy Chamber.

ChelseaAI works through the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard that lets AI assistants connect securely to external services. It works with any MCP-supported assistant. ThinkMarkets recommends Claude, developed by Anthropic, but traders can connect via other popular platforms, such as Grok and ChatGPT.

ChelseaAI is an interface, not an adviser. It executes what the trader instructs. It does not provide recommendations, signals, or investment advice of any kind. The world of trading is evolving from the user interface and charting libraries; the agentic trading revolution will allow users to move beyond interfaces and focus on the underlying product offering.

Control and security

Clients choose their permission level before connecting. Read-only gives the AI access to market data, positions, balances, and trading history. Full access adds the ability to place, modify, and close orders. Either level can be changed or revoked instantly from within ThinkTrader.

One limit holds regardless of permission level: ChelseaAI has no access to funds. Deposits, withdrawals, and transfers are excluded from the integration entirely, by design. Every action is recorded in an in-platform audit log that the AI cannot read or alter. Sessions expire after seven days or 24 hours of inactivity.

Quotes

“Our clients are already running AI assistants as part of how they trade. ChelseaAI means their ThinkMarkets account is in that conversation too. We put a lot of work into the permission model and the funds boundary, not because we had to, but because a product like this only works if people genuinely trust it.”

— Nauman Anees, Co-Founder and CEO, ThinkMarkets

Availability

ChelseaAI is available to ThinkTrader account holders from 2^nd June 2026 via ThinkTrader (https://apo-opa.co/4dYrSQ7), with support for both live and demo accounts. Available exclusively on ThinkTrader. The integration covers 26 tools across market data, position management, order execution, and account information. Setup takes under two minutes. Full documentation is at www.ThinkMarkets.com.