Algeria is one of the least banked economies on the continent, but the policy picture changed in 2025. The Bank of Algeria issued the country’s first dedicated fintech rulebook, and the state has set a target of 50 percent cashless transactions by 2030. Open banking is not on the agenda yet, but for the first time there is a regulated payments framework for it to eventually sit on.
Algeria has long run on cash. Around 57 percent of adults are unbanked, and the figure is higher for women, about 71 percent of whom have no transaction account. Card payments are the main entry point to digital finance, led by the interbank CIB card and Algerie Poste’s Edahabia card, whose base doubled to roughly 14.3 million by the end of 2024. Digital transactions are climbing quickly off a low base, up around 71 percent in early 2024, but the country remains one of the most cash-reliant in the region.
The regulator is the Bank of Algeria. In August 2025 it issued Instruction No. 06-2025, Algeria’s first dedicated framework for payment service providers and digital wallets. The rules set tiered wallet limits, a minimum capital requirement for providers, mandatory segregation of customer funds in escrow, a domestic-headquarters rule, and dinar-only operation. This builds on the 2018 e-commerce law and follows finance-law measures that removed stamp duty on electronic payments to encourage adoption.
Algeria’s near-term push is straightforward financial digitisation rather than data sharing. The government has set a target of 50 percent cashless transactions by 2030 and is opening a regulatory sandbox in 2026 aimed at onboarding a steady pipeline of fintech startups. The immediate work is getting more people onto cards and wallets, expanding acceptance, and giving providers a clear licensing path, all of which come before any open banking conversation.
There is no open banking framework in Algeria and no public roadmap for one. The reasons are structural. Most adults sit outside the formal system, so there is little account data to share, and the ecosystem is still building the basics of licensed providers and interoperable wallets. Instruction 06-2025 matters because it creates the first regulated home for that ecosystem, but the distance from here to consent-based data sharing is large.
The signal to watch in Algeria is execution of the new payment rules and the 2030 cashless target. If the fintech framework and the 2026 sandbox pull providers into a regulated market, and card and wallet use keeps growing, Algeria will start to accumulate the digital footprint that open banking needs. For now the story is a cash economy putting down its first real digital-payment rails, not open banking itself.
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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.
