Interswitch and Open Banking Nigeria
Interswitch, Africa’s largest integrated digital payments and financial technology firm, and pioneer mobile payments firm, Paga have joined other forward-thinking stakeholders in Nigeria’s financial services industry to adopt Open Banking and champion its advocacy in Nigeria with the aim of driving innovation and choice for customers, businesses, financial technology firms, banks and other players in Nigeria’s financial ecosystem.
This information recently emerged as both firms respectively entered a partnership with Open Technology Foundation (OTF), the not-for-profit organisation driving the development and adoption of Open Banking standards in Nigeria.
The addition of Interswitch and Paga as the newest corporate members of the Open Banking Nigeria would serve to further drive the adoption and promotion of a standard Application Programming Interface (API) for financial services in Nigeria.
Around the world, Open Banking is fast transforming the financial landscape, enabling and extending financial services beyond the realm of native services and offerings, improving overall customer engagement, and increasing revenue from new channels. The benefits also include the enablement of a sustainable service model for underserved markets.
Of the 47 countries at various stages of Open Banking implementation, Nigeria is the only African country.
For almost two decades, Interswitch has been at the forefront of innovation in Africa’s banking and financial services industry and has set an informal standard for numerous aspects of digital payments in the country as well as the African continent.
“At Interswitch, we believe that standardized APIs would significantly transform payments in Nigeria and Africa as a whole. Nigeria is a global leader in payments and is expected to similarly lead with Open APIs. As an organization, we are committed to working with banks and the Central Bank to actualize the Open Banking agenda of the Payment Systems Vision 2030,” said Akeem Lawal, Divisional Chief Executive Officer for Payment Processing at Interswitch
Speaking on Paga’s collaboration with the Open Technology Foundation, Paga’s Co-founder and Director of Business Development, Jay Alabraba said: “We understand the importance of collaboration to achieve the goal of extending the frontiers of payments and financial services as a whole. Partnering with Open Technology and other industry stakeholders would further advance our innovative drive, broaden the wide range of our solution offerings to customers, and favourably position Paga to contribute to deepening financial inclusion in Nigeria.”
Ope Adeoye, a trustee at Open Banking Nigeria, welcomed Interswitch and Paga to the movement of likeminded futuristic stakeholders working together to build the next generation of Application Programming Interface (API) standard for the Nigerian banking and financial services industry.
Paga is a mobile payment company that has served over 12 million customers and processed over 72 million transactions worth $4.6 billion in a decade. The firm is building an ecosystem to enable people to digitally send and receive money and creating simple financial access for everyone.
Providing convenience and real value for consumers, Interswitch is an Africa-focused integrated digital payments and commerce company that facilitates the electronic circulation of money as well as the exchange of value between individuals and organisations on a timely and consistent basis.
