Nigeria's Central Bank approves Open Banking launch for August 2025
Nigeria is the first African country to approve Open Banking implementation
The Central Bank of Nigeria has officially approved the implementation of Open Banking, one person with direct knowledge of the process told Notadeepdive. It makes Nigeria the first African country to implement Open Banking.
The approval, granted at a Tuesday meeting ahead of an August 2025 go-live, comes two long years after the CBN approved draft regulations. With the new timeline, banks must begin Open Banking implementation by August 1, 2025.
The CBN gets a lot of knocks (some well deserved), but there’s no denying: this is genuinely innovative stuff.
Every so often, certain ideas promise to dramatically change how financial systems work.
Instant transfers were a game-changer in Nigeria.
Interconnectivity and interoperability — things we now take for granted — weren't always a given (ask anyone who once had to pay a "country fee" to withdraw from a different branch).
Open Banking could be the next system-defining shift.
Here's the rough idea:
Banks have decades worth of customer data.
They haven’t shared this data with others or used it creatively enough.
Open Banking allows customers to consent to letting other financial institutions access their banking data to build new services.
On the customer side, it could look like this:
Shopping online? Pay with bank will be smoother. You’ll be able to log into your bank account and authorize payments without sharing your password. No cards needed either.
Lending apps can assess your creditworthiness directly from your banking history, not through endless “prove yourself with ₦20k” starter loans.
The big push for Open Banking in Nigeria started back in June 2017, when a frustrated fintech CEO tried to integrate with banks and found the experience painful as hell.
The core idea: create a shared API standard across banks so all banks speak the same language.
Progress since then? Slow.
Until today.
What Implementation Will Look Like
The CBN has inaugurated committees and subcommittees for takeover, engagement, legal, technical standards, and more. Importantly: ecosystem members will chair all subcommittees; no CBN staff will chair any group.
Customers will be able to give consent for fintechs, banks, and other regulated players to access their balances, transaction history, and even perform transactions on their behalf.
Data access will happen through a shared, standardized API across all banks and access will be strictly limited to CBN-licensed and supervised entities.
A world-class registry will identify all participants, and a robust consent management framework tied to the BVN will ensure customer control.
Startups like Mono, OnePipe, and others who have built their businesses around banking data access will benefit massively from a fully open ecosystem.
Credit Where It’s Due: This move would not have been possible without the long-term advocacy of the Open Banking Initiative, a non-profit founded by Open Technology Nigeria and spearheaded by Adedeji Olowe.
Members include heavyweights like FCMB, Fidelity Bank, KPMG, Paystack, EY, OnePipe, Lendsqr, PWC, and Flutterwave.
After almost eight years of pushing, Open Banking in Nigeria is finally a reality.
This is absolutely amazing!
We hope CBN is going to be hard on regulation!
Serious regulation to avoid any forms of abuse.
Thank you for the information.
The lending usecase of customers’ data is what I am looking forward too. Hopefully, this also makes direct debit easier and brings a replacement for GSI that mfbs have not been able to use to recover funds from their borrowers.