Andrew Owens is Head of Engineering for Interconnection and Peering Platforms at Teraco Data Environments, where he leads the Africa Cloud Exchange (ACX) and NAPAfrica Internet Exchange Points—critical infrastructure underpinning Africa’s digital and financial ecosystems.

In the fintech sector, where latency, resilience and data sovereignty are paramount, Andrew plays a central role in enabling secure, high-performance interconnection between financial institutions, cloud providers, payment platforms, and network operators. Through NAPAfrica—Africa’s largest Internet Exchange Point—and ACX, he supports the localisation of traffic and direct peering between ecosystems, helping to reduce transaction latency, improve uptime and enhance the performance of real-time financial services.

Andrew’s expertise spans interconnection strategy, peering economics and wide-area network design, with a strong focus on building scalable, carrier-neutral platforms that support digital banking, payments innovation and cross-border financial services. His work directly enables faster, more cost-effective, and compliant fintech infrastructure across sub-Saharan Africa.

He collaborates with global and regional industry bodies, including AF-IX, Euro-IX, AFRINIC, MEF and ISOC, to drive best practices and policy frameworks that strengthen Africa’s internet and financial connectivity landscape.

Prior to Teraco, Andrew developed large-scale data exchange systems in the logistics sector, including a platform supporting the majority of South Africa’s fruit exports. He later helped launch one of the country’s first VoIP services at Storm Voice and Data, where he led the development of authentication and billing systems and managed national network infrastructure—experience that continues to inform his approach to high-availability, transaction-driven environments.