There is an assumption inside Nigeria’s open banking conversation that once people know what open banking is, they will use it. That awareness, if we can just generate enough of it, naturally turns into adoption.
Awareness and adoption are two different jobs that require two different kinds of work. Awareness is getting people to understand what open banking is, what data moves when they consent, what the risks are, what protections exist, all of it explained in language customers actually understand. Adoption is getting people to use something because it is worth using. One is communication. The other is product. A bank can run the best awareness campaign in the country and still see nobody adopt, because the thing they built does not solve a problem anyone actually has.
That distinction sounds obvious when you state it plainly, but most of the industry collapses the two into a single goal and measures only the first. We count impressions, mentions, explainer threads, the number of people who can now define open banking in a sentence. Those are awareness metrics. None of them tell you whether a single Nigerian has done anything differently with their money.
We have not even won the first battle yet
Before going further, it is worth being honest about where we actually are. Even after nine years on this journey, we have not achieved open banking awareness in Nigeria. Not at scale. A growing number of people, mostly banking professionals and fintech enthusiasts, have heard the phrase. Far fewer understand what it means for their accounts, their data, or their daily financial life. Knowing that open banking exists is not the same as knowing that your transaction history belongs to you, that you can consent to share it, that you can withdraw that consent whenever you want, and that doing so is a normal part of how the system works So we are fighting on two fronts at once, and we should be clear-eyed that winning the first does not win the second. We still have to teach people what open banking is. And separately, at the same time, we have to give them something worth adopting once they understand it. Neither effort substitutes for the other. You cannot campaign your way to adoption, and you cannot build your way to awareness.
A fully informed person can still say no
Here is the part that anyone mistaking awareness for adoption would most likely miss. Imagine we win the awareness battle completely. Every Nigerian understands open banking. They know what data is shared, what the risks are, what they stand to gain. Full comprehension, no confusion left. Some of them will still say no. And they will be right to, if nothing built on open banking actually serves them. That refusal is not an awareness failure and it cannot be fixed with better communication. A person who declines open banking out of ignorance can be taught. A person who declines it because they understood it perfectly and found nothing useful in it is telling you something about the product, not about their knowledge. They came to their decision from a position of full awareness. The gap is not in what they know. The gap is in what we built. This is why awareness, on its own, can sometimes work against us. When you raise awareness of something that does not yet deliver, you simply help people arrive faster at the conclusion that it is not for them. You have taught them to recognize a thing they have no reason to use.
Australia already showed us this
We have written before about what happened in Australia. It is worth returning to here because it is the clearest evidence that this distinction is not theoretical. Australia built one of the most technically sound open banking systems in the world. The regulation was there. The security was there. The standards were world-class. And three years after launch, only about 0.31% of bank customers were actively using it. Three in every thousand. The infrastructure was not the problem. The problem was that the system had been built as a compliance exercise rather than as something designed around the problems ordinary Australians actually had. Awareness was not the bottleneck. The bottleneck was that nobody had built things that made the average person want to share their data. When Australia eventually went back and focused on use cases that solved problems people actually had, the numbers moved. Low adoption is rarely a sign that people have not heard of open banking. More often it is a sign that what was built on top of it did not solve a problem worth solving.
What this means for the people building
If you are inside this ecosystem, building products, designing campaigns, pushing open banking forward, the distinction between awareness and adoption changes what you should be spending your time on. The awareness work is necessary, and it falls largely on communication. It means explaining open banking in terms people recognize from their own lives, not in the language of APIs and consent frameworks. It means being honest about the risks alongside the benefits, because trust is built by the people who tell you the full picture, not the ones who only sell you the upside. It means meeting Nigerians where they already are, including on the channels that the unbanked and the under-connected actually use. The adoption work is a different discipline entirely. It does not respond to messaging. It responds to whether the thing you built makes someone’s financial life materially better. Does it get a person credit they could not get before? Does it let a business move money more cheaply? Does it save someone a trip to the branch, a stack of printed statements, an afternoon lost to a process that should have taken two minutes? If the answer is no, then no amount of awareness will save it, because you have made people aware of something that does not earn its place in their lives.
Knowing was always just the doorway
The goal was never for Nigerians to know about open banking. Knowing was always meant to be the doorway, not the destination. The destination is a financial system where people share their data because it gets them something they want, revoke it when they are done, and move between institutions without losing what they have built. Awareness is how people find the door. Adoption is whether anything on the other side of it is worth walking toward. We should keep building awareness, honestly and in plain language, because nobody adopts what they do not understand. But we should stop mistaking it for the finish line. The work that actually decides whether open banking succeeds in Nigeria is the work of building things people will use.
