Cyber-enabled fraud cost UK victims £1.28bn last year, and a single ransomware attack once brought parts of the NHS to a standstill. The Nigerian data scientist now working inside one of Britain’s biggest banks has spent four years arguing that institutions can see these disasters coming — if they are willing to listen to their own data.
On the morning of 12 May 2017, computer screens across dozens of NHS trusts froze and turned red. The WannaCry ransomware worm had swept through the health service, and before the day was out ambulances were being diverted, operations postponed and some 19,000 appointments cancelled. The National Audit Office later put the cost to the NHS at around £92m. It remains the most vivid reminder Britain has of a simple, uncomfortable truth: modern institutions run on data, and data can be turned against them.
Chukwudera Obumneke Anunagba has built an unusual body of work around a related and equally stubborn conviction — that the warning signs of such disasters are almost always present in the data long before anyone chooses to look. “Data analytics, at its best, is not about producing outputs,” he says. “It is about giving people and institutions the clarity to act wisely.” It is a line that might read as a slogan, were it not for the four years of peer-reviewed research he has spent trying to make it operational.
Anunagba’s earliest widely cited work took aim at healthcare. In a 2022 study on financial-forensics techniques for detecting cyber-enabled fraud in telemedicine, he and his co-authors mapped how the rapid migration of care onto digital platforms had opened fresh avenues for false billing, identity theft and manipulated prescriptions — and argued that a combination of blockchain-based transaction verification, machine-learning anomaly detection and biometric authentication could begin to close them. Later papers pressed into the harder economics of the same problem: the ransomware economics that hospital networks now budget for as a cost of doing business, and the cost-effectiveness of zero-trust security architectures for healthcare infrastructure of exactly the kind WannaCry exposed.
“The warning signs are almost always in the data before they are in the headlines. The discipline is choosing to look — and building systems that look for you.”
From healthcare, his research widened into finance, and it is there that his academic interests and his day job now meet. Anunagba works as a technology analyst at Barclays, the London-headquartered bank with operations in more than forty countries, on the unglamorous machinery that makes trustworthy analytics possible: regulatory data frameworks, data-lineage analysis and the governance of the critical data elements that sit inside the bank’s SQL-based architectures. It is the plumbing beneath the dashboard — the assurance that when a model flags a suspicious transaction, the data feeding it is complete, traceable and defensible to a regulator. In a country where UK Finance reports that fraudsters stole £1.28bn in 2025, with authorised push payment (APP) fraud continuing to climb, that assurance is no longer a back-office nicety. It is the front line.
His most directly relevant paper reads almost as a manifesto for the work. In an advanced conceptual model for strengthening audit quality using data analytics across financial institutions, Anunagba and his co-authors argue that the sampling-based auditing that banks and insurers have relied on for generations is no longer equal to the volume and sophistication of modern risk. Embedding anomaly detection, process mining and predictive scoring across the entire audit lifecycle, they contend, can turn assurance from a backward-looking exercise into an early-warning system — one that flags the control failure before, rather than after, the money has gone.
In December 2025 that blend of research and practice earned him the Nigeria Technology Awards’ Most Exceptional Data Analytics Professional of the Year, a recognition that cited both his enterprise data-governance work and his peer-reviewed output. It sits alongside a run of editorial honours — Reviewer of the Year in 2022 and 2024, and Editor of the Year across 2022, 2023 and 2024 for several information-technology and cybersecurity journals — marking him as someone the field trusts to judge the work of others, not merely to produce his own.
His route there was deliberate. Anunagba graduated from Kennesaw State University in the United States with a degree in information systems and the institution’s Dean’s Award, completing internships at Barclays — where he led a four-person team building an internal networking platform — and at the networking-security firm Infoblox. He was selected as an HBCU 20×20 Tech FORWARD Fellow and holds fellowship status with the Chartered Institute of Strategic Management. Read together, the credentials describe a professional who has consistently pushed towards the point where technical depth meets institutional consequence.
That is also where he seems most comfortable. Ask what connects a paper on hospital ransomware to a governance framework for autonomous AI agents to the audit systems of a global bank, and the answer, in his telling, is not the technology but the stakes. Each is a setting in which a single undetected failure can cascade into real harm — a patient’s record, a customer’s savings, an institution’s licence to operate. “The question is never whether the data can tell you something,” he argues. “It is whether you have built something honest enough to listen.”
For a field that has spent years promising that artificial intelligence will render fraud obsolete, it is a notably modest framing. Anunagba is not claiming to have solved the problem. He is claiming, with a fair weight of published evidence behind him, that Britain’s banks and hospitals can see trouble coming earlier than they think — if they are prepared to build the discipline to look. On the evidence of WannaCry, and of a fraud bill that now runs past a billion pounds a year, that may prove the more valuable claim.
Chukwudera Obumneke Anunagba is a data-analytics and cybersecurity researcher and a technology analyst at Barclays. His peer-reviewed work spans healthcare cybersecurity, ransomware economics, financial-sector audit analytics and enterprise data governance.
