Nigeria's curious fintech bill

A confusing new regulator

Nov 09, 2025

Happy ‘Manchester City beat Liverpool’ day to those who celebrate. If this newsletter was shared with you, subscribe here for free:

TOGETHER WITH CREDIT DIRECT

The things you need shouldn’t have to wait. Before you shop, it helps to know how much you can work with.

With Credit Direct Checkout, you can get what you need now and spread repayment over a flexible period without pressure.

Check Your Spending Limit

A curious fintech bill

One way to understand the Nigerian distrust for the government and its agencies is in how we react when we hear “regulation.” Of course, I’m pulling this stat out of a hat, but I’m willing to wager that 7 of 10 people will scrunch up their noses at the thought of the government or regulator taking a long look at their sector or business.

Despite the very real and numerous positive impacts of regulation (banking is an obvious example), we still find enough stories to justify this national side-eye.

Last week, news of a bill to establish the Nigerian Fintech Regulatory Commission caught the public imagination. The pushback was instant and with good reason. Nigeria’s Central Bank already regulates the country’s financial institutions and, for years, it has mostly created licensing categories for fintechs and left them alone. That has changed in the last two years, with the CBN now paying very close attention.

In April 2024, for instance, it ordered four top fintechs — Moniepoint, OPay, PalmPay and Kuda — to stop onboarding new customers while it reviewed their KYC and fraud controls. That move forced a necessary house-cleaning as fraud incidents were on the rise, and it made it clear that these apps were now systemically important, not cute little startups.

In late April 2025, the CBN reportedly fined Paystack ₦250 million over Zap, its consumer payments app, because the product went beyond the licence category under which Paystack operates. Several other fintechs have also quietly had regulatory “conversations” in the same period. The days of “move fast, break things, and hope the CBN doesn’t notice” are gone.

Which brings us to the bill that wants to create a separate commission to regulate fintechs and, on top of that, a National Fintech Management Council. Basically, a new regulator and a super-committee in what is already a crowded field.

The bill, sponsored by Hon. Fuad Kayode Laguda, an All Progressives Congress (APC) lawmaker, reads like a solution in search of a problem, and one that would create far more regulatory confusion than clarity.

What this bill is really trying to do

On paper, the pitch is one powerful fintech regulator to licence and supervise all fintechs, set technical standards, promote competition, protect customers, and coordinate everyone else. To hear the sponsors tell it, this is about streamlining a fragmented landscape and giving fintechs a single statutory home.

Still, the bill reads like someone took the Nigerian Communications Act, did a Find-and-Replace on “communications” and “spectrum,” and pasted in “fintech” and “digital services.”

A few highlights:

The proposed Nigerian Fintech Regulatory Commission (NFRC) would license and regulate “fintech services”, issue regulations, approve consumer protection codes, set fees, and even meddle in tariffs.
The bill also creates a National Fintech Management Council, chaired by the Minister of Finance, with CBN, SEC, NCC, FIRS, NITDA, NDPC and others on the table and the President of the Fintech Association of Nigeria sitting in as “Liaison Officer.” It will be funded and serviced by the Ministry of Finance.

So this is an independent regulator reporting to a council chaired by the minister, and includes the industry’s main lobby group.

Direct collision with the CBN

Everything this new commission wants to do is already part of the CBN’s job description.

Under the CBN Act and BOFIA Act, the Central Bank has statutory oversight over banks and the national payments system. It already licences and supervises payment service providers, mobile money operators, payment banks, switches, and gateways; it sets rules on KYC, consumer protection, settlement risk, and fraud. It runs an innovation sandbox.

Strangely, this bill stacks a regulator on top of an apex regulator.

It defines “fintech” as essentially any technology-enabled financial service. PoS agents, BNPL merchants, banks, USSD, remittance platforms, savings apps, and wealthtechs all fall under its purview.
It doesn’t exempt firms already regulated by other agencies. So the same company could be under CBN, SEC, NDPC, and now NFRC, depending on which product you point at.

Then it goes further: “no one can provide any type of fintech service without a licence from the commission.” So even if you already have a CBN licence today, this bill wants you to show up at a new regulator’s door and start again. At best, this is duplication. At worst, it’s a turf war.

The telecom copy-paste problem

Buried in the bill are three separate references to fintechs paying for “spectrum” and the commission having powers over the “sale of spectrum” and “scarce resources in the sub-sector.” Spectrum makes sense in telecoms where you’re allocating radio frequencies. In fintech, what spectrum are we buying? USSD short codes? 2.4GHz Wi-Fi?

There are also long passages about tariffs and pricing that look like they were lifted from the telecoms template: detailed provisions about controlling prices, approving “tariff plans,” and regulating the “communications industry” that someone forgot to fully scrub.

It feels like the mindset here is, “We know how to regulate phone companies, let’s just do the same thing to payments.”

Payments and digital finance do need strong rules, but they don’t behave like GSM operators, and you can’t treat bank accounts and payment apps as if they were SIM cards.

Ultimately, this isn’t some bold, fresh rethink of how to regulate a modern fintech ecosystem; it’s the 2003 telecoms law in a fintech wig, asking for a share of the national cake.

You can see the seams everywhere: the same sentences, the same licensing logic, the same chapter headings, the same language dragged from a world of masts and spectrum into a universe of apps and APIs.

Lawmakers will say this is normal “template drafting,” and to a point, that’s true, but in one of the most interesting sectors, surely we could use more rigour?

Finally, nobody who takes fintech seriously is regulating it this way. In Singapore, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) is the central bank and financial regulator. It regulates payments under the Payment Services Act and created a FinTech & Innovation Group inside MAS, not a separate fintech regulator.

In the UK, the Financial Conduct Authority runs the regulatory sandbox and innovation hub within its existing mandate, while payments oversight is split between the FCA and the Bank of England, not a “Fintech Commission” with its own tariff book.

In the US, it’s messy but the pattern is similar: fintechs sit under a mix of Fed/FDIC/OCC for banking, SEC/CFTC for securities and derivatives, and CFPB for consumer protection. The common thread is clear: keep fintech inside the core financial regulators, build specialist teams and sandboxes around them, and use coordination, not a brand-new sector regulator modelled on a 2003 telecoms law.

That’s it from me. See you next week. If you liked this newsletter, please share or leave a comment!