Uganda has one of the more developed payments-regulation setups in the region, and it is building the infrastructure that open banking would need. The Bank of Uganda licenses payment providers under a modern legal framework, runs a sandbox that is graduating real fintechs, and is building a national payment switch. Open banking itself is not here yet, but the groundwork is unusually far along.
Mobile money dominates digital finance in Uganda. In the year to June 2024, mobile money moved about 253.7 trillion Ugandan shillings, roughly five times the size of the banking sector’s assets. That scale tells you where the financial activity really is: on mobile wallets, not in bank branches. It also means any open banking model here would have to bring mobile money and banks onto the same rails.
The regulator is the Bank of Uganda, working under the National Payment Systems Act of 2020 and its 2021 Regulations. This gives Uganda a clear licensing regime for payment providers, and by December 2025 there were 54 licensed payment service providers in the market. The central bank also runs a regulatory sandbox that has moved from testing to real outcomes, graduating Wave and licensing NALA in December 2025, which shows the framework is genuinely pulling fintechs into the regulated space.
The piece that matters most for open banking is the Bank of Uganda National Payment Switch, being built to connect banks, mobile money operators, and other providers for full interoperability. A national switch of this kind is the direct precursor to open banking: once money and, later, data can move across institutions on shared infrastructure, the step to consent-based data sharing becomes much smaller.
Uganda does not have an open banking framework yet, and there is no published timeline. But between a modern payments law, a working licensing regime, an active sandbox, and a national switch under construction, it has more of the preconditions in place than most of its neighbours. The signal to watch is the switch going live and the sandbox pipeline maturing, both of which move the country closer to a real open banking conversation.
Important Links
Open Banking Nigeria (Open Technology Foundation) is a non-profit backed by a group of industry experts across banking, fintech, risk management, and more to drive and launch the open banking standard in Nigeria.
