By Ayo Onikoyi

Last year, I convened Nigeria’s inaugural Open Banking working group—a coalition of forward-thinking banks, fintech startups, and regulators united by a shared vision: data should move as freely as money. In an ecosystem long dominated by siloed systems and proprietary interfaces, open-API mandates promise to dismantle barriers, empowering consumers with choice, convenience, and personalized financial solutions.

Breaking Down Data Silos

For decades, banks in Nigeria guarded customer data like a fortress. Yet in a world where consumers expect seamless digital experiences, this model is untenable. Under the Central Bank of Nigeria’s 2021 Open Banking framework, financial institutions are required to expose standardized APIs, enabling licensed third parties to securely access customer-permissioned data. The result is a dynamic marketplace: budget apps that aggregate accounts in real time, lenders that leverage payment histories for instant credit decisions, and insurers tailoring policies based on actual spending patterns.

Catalyzing Personalized Products

During our pilot API sandbox in partnership with three leading commercial banks, developers built prototypes in weeks—not months. One fintech produced a micro-savings tool that rounds up every purchase to the nearest naira, transferring the spare change into an interest-bearing account. Another launched a subscription-management platform that flags unused services and negotiates better rates on behalf of users. These innovations illustrate how, when banks open their doors, agile startups can co-create products that resonate with Nigeria’s diverse, digitally-savvy population.

Jude Ogedegbe’s Role: Orchestrator and Advocate

As the facilitator of the Open Banking working group, I led monthly workshops where regulators laid out compliance guardrails, banks shared API specifications, and startups demonstrated proof-of-concept integrations. My team also organized hackathons in Abuja and Lagos, awarding grants to promising use cases. By chairing this public-private co-op, I’ve helped establish governance principles—data privacy by design, consumer-consent protocols, and standardized documentation—that underpin a secure, scalable ecosystem.

Ensuring Trust and Security

Open Banking’s promise hinges on trust. In our sandbox, we partnered with the Nigerian Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) and the National Identity Management Commission to integrate multi-factor authentication and consent tokens tied to BVN and NIN. Customers retain full control: they grant, revoke, and audit third-party access through their banking apps. This consent-driven model not only aligns with global best practices but also addresses local concerns around data misuse.

Toward a New Era of Financial Inclusion

Open Banking is more than a technology shift—it’s a catalyst for inclusion. By enabling fintechs to build lightweight, mobile-first services, we can reach unbanked and underbanked populations who have long been sidelined by legacy systems. Whether it’s a gig-economy worker receiving real-time invoicing tools or a rural artisan accessing microcredit through a mobile wallet, data portability unlocks new pathways to economic participation.

A Call to Cooperative Action

Our work is only beginning. Banks must commit to API uptime and expand data scopes beyond transaction history to include savings goals, investment portfolios, and credit scores. Regulators should streamline licensing for third-party providers while enforcing strict privacy standards. And fintech innovators must prioritize user interfaces that demystify open-data consent. Together, we can transform Nigeria into a global exemplar of customer-centric finance.

Open Banking isn’t an abstract ideal—it is the future of Nigerian finance.

By liberating data through open protocols, we invite a generation of entrepreneurs to design the financial products our people deserve: intuitive, affordable, and built around real needs. As convenor of this movement, I’m proud to see our early pilots bear fruit.

Now, it’s time to scale these successes nationwide—and place Nigeria at the forefront of the digital-finance revolution.