Written By | Torch Media Africa
Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya and South Africa are each building rules for consent-based financial data sharing.
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Technological Transformation
In October 2026, two African regulators acted on open banking within days of each other. On 12 October the Bank of Ghana published a draft Open Banking Directive for public comment, with a deadline of 11 November 2026. Around the same time, Kenya's National Treasury and Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) circulated a draft National Payment System Bill, 2026. Among other changes, the bill would create licence categories for payment-initiation and account-information services, the two activities at the centre of open banking.
Five years after the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) issued Africa's first open banking regulatory framework, the model is spreading across the continent. Nigeria's experience also shows that publishing a framework is only the first step. A system in which a customer can let a lender read their bank statements, or let an app start a payment from their account, through one standard and secure interface takes years more work. This article compares four approaches: West Africa's regulator-led models in Nigeria and Ghana, Kenya's licensing approach, and South Africa's market-led system.
What Open Banking Does and Why It Matters in Africa
Open banking means that, with the customer's explicit consent, banks share account data such as balances and transaction histories with licensed third parties, and allow those parties to initiate payments, through standardised application programming interfaces (APIs). The data belongs to the customer. The bank acts as custodian and must release it when the customer asks.
In Europe, open banking was mainly a competition policy aimed at a few dominant retail banks. In Africa the case rests more on credit. Many borrowers have no credit file, but they do have years of bank and wallet transactions. Lenders that can read verified cash-flow data instead of relying on collateral can price small-business and consumer loans more accurately. Shared standards also reduce the cost of building fintech products. Without them, each new company must negotiate separate integrations with every bank, or rely on 'screen scraping' of customer logins, which carries security risks.
Nigeria: Pioneer With a Long Delay
Nigeria's sequence shows how long the process takes. Open Banking Nigeria, an industry body now formally the Open Technology Foundation with more than 55 member banks, fintechs and consultancies, was founded in 2017 to write common API standards. The CBN issued its Regulatory Framework for Open Banking in February 2021 and Operational Guidelines in March 2023. The guidelines group data and services into risk tiers, with stricter access requirements for more sensitive tiers. The CBN then set 1 August 2025 as the nationwide go-live date.
Sources disagree about what happened on that date. Some business-intelligence publications describe 1 August 2025 as Africa's first formal open banking go-live. Open Banking Nigeria's own status update, revised in July 2026, says the August 2025 date 'did not materialize'. According to the update, the CBN appointed five industry implementation workstreams covering governance and regulation, legal and compliance, technical infrastructure, data security, and stakeholder engagement. Those workstreams delivered their documents by September 2025, and the industry is still waiting for the regulator's next directive and a phased launch. In October 2025 the CBN said open banking had not yet gone live and that it was developing a single standard API template. Its February 2026 policy report committed to a phased rollout during 2026.
The planned architecture is centralised. The Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS) will run two shared components. The Open Banking Registry will be a verified directory of every licensed participant. The Open Banking Consent Management System will let individuals and companies grant, monitor and revoke data-sharing permissions, linked to the Bank Verification Number (BVN) and subject to the Nigeria Data Protection Act. Banks such as Sterling, Wema and Sparkle, the digital bank, have been building API capacity for years. Fintechs such as Mono, OnePipe and Lendsqr are waiting to use the system.
The delay has cost the industry. Okra, a Nigerian open banking API startup that raised about US$16 million from investors including TLcom Capital, shut down in May 2025 when its services stopped responding. Post-mortems pointed to four years of regulatory delay, dollar-denominated cloud costs during a period when the naira lost more than half its value, and competition from better-funded rivals. Its main surviving competitor, Mono, has raised about US$17.6 million and partnered with Mastercard on account-to-account payments. Some analysts now expect modest gains. An August 2026 editorial in All Business Africa argued that faster onboarding and somewhat better credit scoring are realistic over the next two years. It said a broad restructuring of Nigerian banking is unlikely, because large banks with older core systems have little commercial reason to expose customer data quickly unless penalties are high enough to change that.
Ghana: A Central Bank Platform
Ghana is following a regulator-led approach with an important difference: the central bank itself would run the shared infrastructure. The Bank of Ghana first published a draft directive in December 2024. The October 2026 consultation would require all regulated financial institutions to join an Open Banking Service and share customer-consented data through standardised APIs, with the Bank of Ghana establishing and operating the OpenDX platform. The draft distinguishes between Account Servicing Payment Service Providers, which hold accounts; licensed Third-Party Providers, which use the data; and customers, whose explicit consent is required. It also sets API technical standards, data-security protocols and rules on liability.
Ghana is also preparing the security side. In April 2026 the Bank of Ghana issued its final Cyber and Information Security Directive, which requires cyber expertise on bank boards and adds data-localisation rules. It explicitly prepared the sector for 'open banking and quantum computing'. Ghana's mobile-money system is among the most interoperable in Africa, so a central-bank-run data exchange could connect bank and wallet data more fully than Nigeria's bank-centred model.
Kenya: Regulating the Activities Instead of Setting a Single Date
Kenya has never had a formal open banking framework. It has had a working form of open banking through Safaricom's Daraja API, which gives authorised developers access to M-Pesa, and through open APIs published by Co-operative Bank and other lenders. The CBK's 2021–2025 strategy used the phrase 'open infrastructure' rather than open banking.
The draft National Payment System Bill, 2026 would bring this informal system under regulation by licensing the activities. It would replace the 15-year-old existing law with about ten licence categories. Minimum capital would range from KSh5 million for light services such as payment initiation and account-information services to KSh250 million for electronic-money issuers, the category that includes the large mobile-money platforms. Firms holding several licences would need to meet the highest threshold plus half of each additional one, and existing operators would have 12 months to comply. Setting the account-information licence at the lowest capital tier signals that Nairobi wants many data-driven fintechs to enter, while bringing them under CBK supervision. A separate CBK–National Bank of Rwanda arrangement signed in March 2026 lets payment fintechs licensed in one country operate in the other, which could later support cross-border data services.
South Africa: Market-Built, With Regulation Still Pending
South Africa has the continent's most developed account-to-account payment products, built largely without a national open banking mandate. Stitch, founded in Cape Town in 2019, raised a US$55 million Series B in April 2025. It runs a single API for pay-by-bank, cards, wallets, debit orders and payouts, and holds a South African Reserve Bank (SARB) licence that lets it process transactions directly. Critics note that much of this relies on bilateral bank integrations rather than mandated common standards.
Formal rules are still pending. Writing in February 2026, law firm Webber Wentzel noted that 2025 brought no formal open finance developments. It said adoption of an open finance framework by the Financial Sector Conduct Authority (FSCA) remains likely, together with guidelines for third-party providers and open finance provisions in the Conduct of Financial Institutions (COFI) Bill. In parallel, SARB's Payments Ecosystem Modernisation programme is finalising rules that would let licensed non-banks access the national payment system directly. That change matters at least as much for competition as data-sharing rules.
Lessons and Risks
Comparing these countries suggests four lessons.
First, a regulation coming into force is different from banks actually implementing it. Unless incumbents face firm deadlines and penalties, the banks whose data matters most have the least reason to move quickly.
Second, infrastructure-only startups struggle when the market is slow to form. Okra's failure, and the survival of companies that bundled open banking into payments products, suggest that open banking APIs work better as a feature of a broader product than as a standalone business, at least until volumes grow.
Third, consent infrastructure needs to be shared. Nigeria's NIBSS-run registry and consent system and Ghana's central-bank-run OpenDX both treat consent and participant verification as public infrastructure. This reduces the risk that each fintech handles sensitive data in its own way.
Fourth, wallets need to be included. In Kenya, Ghana and much of West Africa, mobile money accounts hold more of people's financial history than bank accounts do. Frameworks limited to banks will miss much of the data that would help people without credit files.
Fragmentation is also a risk. Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya and South Africa are developing different licence categories, consent models and API specifications. Cross-border fintechs and the African Continental Free Trade Area's digital-trade protocols would benefit from interoperable standards. Agreeing on those standards now would cost less than reconciling four incompatible systems later.
The direction is now clear: customers in Africa's largest digital-finance markets are moving toward control over their own financial data. The pace will depend on enforcement, shared infrastructure and inclusion of mobile money, more than on publishing further frameworks.
