Kill bill
Recognition and access can keep a bad thing going
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TOGETHER WITH CREDIT DIRECT
The tax reforms have been passed. How prepared are you? March 31 is the filing deadline for employed individuals. June 30 is the corporate deadline for business owners. Both are closer than they feel right now.
Our Head of Finance and Strategy, Dr. Emeka Ucheaga, sat down with Abiodun Kayode-Alli, Senior Tax Consultant at PwC, for a conversation that cuts through the noise, what the new reforms actually mean, what they change for your business, and what you should be doing before the deadline arrives.
Kill bill
The bill to establish a Nigerian Fintech Regulatory Commission is hard to take seriously as policy, but it must now be taken seriously as politics.
When I first wrote about it in November 2025, it was a telecoms-era regulatory thinking dragged into fintech, with not enough editing. The text had fintechs paying for “spectrum” and defined fintech so loosely that a bank with a mobile app could qualify. Most importantly, it proposed planting a brand-new regulator on top of the Central Bank of Nigeria, which already licenses and supervises payment service providers, mobile money operators, switches, gateways, payment banks, and most of the machinery that makes digital payments work.
Despite the bill’s many problems, it has momentum.
On March 2, the House of Representatives held a public hearing across five joint committees. Speaker Abbas Tajudeen opened the session and described the proposed commission as “complementary” to existing regulators. The bill’s sponsor, Hon. Fuad Laguda, was also on hand.
Who wants this and why
One thing that everyone at the public hearing seemed to agree on is the need for regulation. Where opinions diverge is between people who already have a route into the current regulatory order and those who do not.
OPay’s Maxwell Loko warned that a parallel regulator would mean duplicated licensing, higher compliance costs, and investment uncertainty. He recommended a single lead regulator anchored by the CBN, with clearer inter-agency coordination around it.
FairMoney’s Henry Obiekea was more diplomatic but arrived at the same conclusion: dual oversight would mean more procedural friction and room for contradictory instructions.
By and large, the licensed fintechs don’t want this bill.
On the other side of the divide are the Association of Telecommunications, Information Technology, Cable Satellite Network Operators and Allied Services Employers of Nigeria (ATICEN) and the Association of Mobile Money and Bank Agents in Nigeria (AMBAN).
These are the infrastructure layer beneath the apps, and they believe the CBN has built a regulatory architecture that focuses only on a handful of companies, with everyone else shuffling for attention.
Nigeria’s digital finance infrastructure is wider than the list of firms the CBN talks to most often, they argue. These players want recognition and a seat at the table.
Yet, their real grievance has not magically produced a good law.
Section 31 of the bill requires all fintech operators to obtain an NFRC licence even if they already hold licences from the CBN or SEC. On the bill’s logic, the entire industry will become retroactively unlicensed on Day One. One stakeholder at the hearing flagged this and recommended an initial compliance window rather than criminal sanctions.
The bill also gives the commission broad discretion over licence conditions, suspensions, revocations, consumer codes, tariffs, and competition matters, authorities other agencies already exercise. It is one more regulator added to the pile, with enough overlapping powers to guarantee turf wars.
Three days after the House hearing, the Senate went in the opposite direction. Senator Adetokunbo Abiru, chairman of the Senate Committee on Banking, Insurance and Other Financial Institutions, said fintech should be placed explicitly under the CBN’s supervision through an amendment to the Bank and Other Financial Institutions Act (BOFIA). Strengthening BOFIA and modernising the CBN’s existing powers, he argued, would be more effective than creating a standalone agency that duplicates functions and fragments authority.
Senator Abiru’s position is a sensible legislative articulation of the alternative case that the existing framework for regulating needs updating. But the answer is not a version of the NCC for Fintechs.
The CBN appears to be thinking along similar lines. Its February Fintech Policy Insight Report proposed a Standing Fintech Engagement Forum, a Single Regulatory Window for licensing coordination, an expanded sandbox, and a shared compliance utility. You can disagree with the CBN about many things — and many people do — but this is a better plan to improve coordination.
Ultimately, the best argument for the fintech regulatory commission bill is political representation.
If the National Assembly wants to force a conversation about who gets seen in Nigeria’s fintech architecture, that is a useful fight. Agents and infrastructure providers have legitimate grievances about a system that treats them as an afterthought. But if the claim is that a new commission is the best way to regulate a fast-growing sector, it should be laughed back into committee.
This bill has stayed alive because it gives several constituencies something the current system does not: recognition, access, and maybe a future lever of influence. That is often enough to keep a bad bill moving.