Access Holdings Plc has announced the appointment of Ifedayo Orimoloye as Executive Director, Risk Management of its flagship subsidiary, Access Bank Plc.

The company disclosed this in a regulatory filing signed by Sunday Ekwochi, Group Company Secretary, on Friday, saying the appointment followed the approval of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and would take effect from 21 September.

Commenting on the appointment, Aigboje Aig-Imoukhuede, Group Chairman, Access Holdings Plc, said the appointment will further strengthen the Bank’s risk governance and support its scale to value focus.

“Mr. Orimoloye brings strong global risk management experience and strategic leadership to the Board of Access Bank Plc. His appointment will further strengthen the Bank’s risk governance and support its scale to value focus. We are pleased to welcome him and look forward to his contributions to the Group’s long-term value creation agenda,” he said.

The appointment, the company said, reinforces Access Bank’s commitment to strong governance, prudent risk management and sustainable stakeholder value.

It added that the appointment was made in line with applicable regulatory requirements and the Bank’s corporate governance framework.

Profile

Mr Orimoloye is an internationally recognised risk management executive with over 25 years’ experience across leading financial institutions in Africa, Europe and the United States.

His expertise spans enterprise risk management, capital optimisation, credit governance, regulatory compliance and strategic transformation.

READ ALSO: CBN begins work on new financial inclusion strategy, targets deeper access

He was recently the Group Chief Risk Officer of the African Development Bank, where he oversaw a portfolio exceeding $40 billion and supported the institution’s continued AAA ratings from Moody’s Investors Service, S&P Global Ratings and Fitch Ratings.

He also played key roles in landmark capital and securitisation transactions, including initiatives to expand renewable energy access across Africa.

Mr Orimoloye previously held senior risk leadership positions at Sterling Bank Plc, Ecobank Transnational Incorporated, Wells Fargo Bank, HSBC and Citigroup, where he led risk transformation, portfolio management and governance initiatives across multiple markets.

He holds dual bachelor’s degrees in Economics and Finance, as well as an MBA in Finance from California State University, Hayward.

India has extended its anti-spam regime to require caller-ID and call-management apps to share users’ spam reports with telecom operators, prompting spam-blocking app maker Truecaller to call the ruling anti-competitive.

On Friday, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), the country’s telecom regulator, amended rules governing commercial communications, making it mandatory for caller-ID and call-management apps that let users flag calls as spam or junk to send those reports to a blockchain-based platform maintained by telecom operators. The platform tracks commercial communications and enforces anti-spam rules.

The change, TRAI said, is intended to broaden the pool of spam reports available for action against spammers, effectively connecting reports collected by apps with the telecom industry’s enforcement infrastructure.

However, Truecaller told TechCrunch that it sees this requirement as a “one-way exchange” that is “anti-competitive,” arguing that it transfers commercially valuable data from call-management apps like itself to telecom operators.

India is Truecaller’s largest market, accounting for well over 350 million of its more than 500 million monthly active users globally. The Stockholm-based company uses community reports alongside automated detection and other signals to identify and block spam calls.

The rules come as India grapples with spam and fraudulent calls at enormous scale. In its report in February, Truecaller said its users in the country encountered around 42 billion spam calls in 2025, including calls that were blocked, labeled, or ignored. The company also stated that it blocked nearly 12 billion spam calls during the year.

It is not the first time Truecaller and the Indian regulator have been at odds over how spam calls should be handled. The Swedish company previously objected to restrictions preventing call-management apps from automatically labeling calls from certain government-designated number ranges as spam. It argued that the exemption could allow unwanted calls to escape its filters.

However, Friday’s amendments retain that restriction and have barred call-management apps from blanket blocking, filtering, or spam-tagging calls from designated number series used for promotional, service, and transactional communications. Individual users can still choose to block such calls on their own devices, the regulator said.

“While our data and user sentiment clearly show that spam has skyrocketed due to this free pass to spammers, we have been compliant with this since late last year,” a Truecaller spokesperson said.

Sumeysh Srivastava, a partner at New Delhi-based consulting firm The Quantum Hub, who leads its telecom-regulation policy work, said the latest change bridges two distinct layers: Telecom operators provide the underlying network and run the blockchain-based anti-spam system, while caller-ID apps operate on top of the network to identify and filter calls.

That raises technical and jurisdictional questions, Srivastava told TechCrunch, including what reporting standards apps will have to follow and how the requirement will be enforced against companies that are not themselves telecom operators.

A March draft proposed (PDF) using India’s IT laws to enforce the requirement. However, Srivastava pointed out that the new announcement did not say whether that enforcement mechanism was retained in the final rules.

It is also unclear how much information the apps will actually have to provide under the updated regulation. Kazim Rizvi, founding director of New Delhi-based policy think tank The Dialogue, told TechCrunch that requiring an app to transmit a specific spam report made by a user is materially different from requiring it to share the broader datasets, reputation signals, or analytical systems it uses to identify suspicious calls.

The rules will need clarity on what information must be transmitted, how users are notified or asked for consent, and how that data can subsequently be retained and used, Rizvi said.

TRAI did not respond to TechCrunch’s questions about what information apps would be required to share and whether the rule would also apply to spam-reporting features built into smartphone operating systems and dialers such as Android and iOS.

New rules for AI-powered calls

The amendments also address the growing use of software and AI voice agents to make calls. Calls made automatically, without a person directly dialing the number, will now fall under TRAI’s application-to-person (A2P) framework. That includes robocalls and calls using prerecorded or artificial voices.

Companies using such systems will have to declare their use and the phone numbers involved to their telecom operators in advance. Undeclared A2P calls will be treated as spam, TRAI said.

The key test, Srivastava said, is how a call is initiated, rather than simply whether it uses an AI-generated voice, leaving some uncertainty around AI-assisted calls that involve human initiation.

Satya N. Gupta, a former additional secretary at TRAI, told TechCrunch that the new rules do not restrict businesses from using AI or other automated calling technologies, but instead require them to disclose their use to telecom operators.

Telecom operators will also be allowed to levy a termination charge of up to 5 paise (about 0.052 cents) per minute on A2P calls. However, calls made using certain designated number ranges will be exempt.

Rizvi told TechCrunch that the new definition could also cover calls made using software even when a person is still involved, such as calls from contact centers and click-to-call services. “Without that distinction, the A2P category risks becoming broader than the regulatory harm it is intended to address,” he said.