Gabon is an upper-middle-income country and the fifth-largest oil producer in Africa, with a population of roughly 2.3 million people, about 70% of whom live in just two cities: Libreville and Port-Gentil. Oil has historically dominated the economy, accounting for more than half of the country’s exports, GDP, and government revenue. This heavy dependence on extractive industries has shaped both the country’s wealth and its vulnerability, and in recent years, the government has made economic diversification a central priority.
Gabon is part of the Central African Economic and Monetary Community (CEMAC), a six-country bloc that shares the CFA franc (XAF) and is regulated by the Bank of Central African States (BEAC). The regional banking commission, COBAC, oversees financial institutions across the zone. Gabon’s banking sector is relatively small but sound, though highly concentrated. BGFIBank, a local private group headquartered in Libreville, dominates the market. In the first quarter of 2025, BGFIBank alone accounted for over 71% of all new bank lending in the country, with no other bank exceeding a 10% share. BGFI Holding Corporation also moved toward a landmark listing on the BVMAC (the regional stock exchange based in Libreville) in late 2025.
Several pan-African banking groups have entered the Gabonese market in recent years, growing their combined market share steadily. UBA, Orabank, and others now compete alongside local and regional institutions, adding depth to the sector.
Gabon has made notable progress on financial inclusion, though a closer look reveals an important nuance. According to the World Bank’s Global Findex 2025, around 68% of adults now hold some form of financial account, placing Gabon among the top ten most financially included countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Digital payment usage stands at 67%, and mobile phone ownership reaches 87%, with nearly 70% internet penetration.
But traditional bank account ownership remains much lower, at roughly 30% of adults. The gap between those two numbers is filled almost entirely by mobile money. In 2024, mobile money transactions in Gabon exceeded CFA 4,000 billion (roughly $7 billion), with nearly 368 million operations recorded. The main mobile money players are Airtel Money and Moov Money, both telco-led and operating under bank-electronic money issuer licenses. Alongside them, CLIKPAY, a homegrown fintech, became the first company in Central Africa to receive a standalone payment institution license from COBAC in November 2023. CLIKPAY offers consumer and merchant mobile wallets with QR-based payments, bill payments, salary processing, and transfers, and was supported in its early growth by the UN Capital Development Fund (UNCDF).
Despite the high mobile money activity, the microfinance sector remains underdeveloped, with few regulated MFIs and a large number of informal operators. The informal economy overall represents an estimated 40 to 50% of GDP, a massive segment that remains outside the formal financial system.
Like the rest of the CEMAC region, Gabon does not have a dedicated open banking framework. There are no mandatory or voluntary data-sharing requirements for financial institutions, and no specific guidelines on third-party access to customer financial data through APIs.
That said, several regulatory building blocks are in place or under development:
At the regional level, BEAC has been driving payment system modernization through GIMACPAY, its interoperability infrastructure, which since 2020 has connected over 70 financial institutions, mobile money operators, and payment service providers across the CEMAC zone. In November 2025, BEAC also mandated the adoption of the ISO 20022 messaging standard across all CEMAC financial institutions, a move aimed at improving payment transparency, fraud detection, and cross-border interoperability.
BEAC introduced sweeping new digital payment regulations throughout 2025, establishing stricter capital requirements, licensing standards, security protocols, and reporting obligations for fintechs and payment service providers operating in the zone.
On data protection, Gabon is ahead of many peers. The country enacted its first data protection law in 2011, which was significantly updated in 2023 through Law No. 025/2023. This law establishes an independent supervisory authority (the APDPVP), mandates data protection officers for organizations handling large-scale or sensitive data, requires impact assessments for high-risk processing, and grants individuals rights to access, rectification, erasure, portability, and objection. Penalties for non-compliance range from CFA 1 million to 100 million. Gabon also passed a cybersecurity law in 2023 and a law regulating electronic transactions in 2021, giving the country a relatively well-rounded digital legal foundation.
In September 2025, Gabon adopted a new legal framework specifically to regulate and accelerate the digital transformation of public administration. This sits alongside the broader eGabon and Gabon Digital programs, which aim to digitize public services, streamline administrative procedures, and improve government transparency.
The Gabonese government has been unusually active in forging partnerships to accelerate its digital transition:
In December 2025, the Ministry of Digital Economy, Digitalization and Innovation (MENDI) signed a partnership with UNCDF to strengthen the digital finance ecosystem. The collaboration focuses on inter-institutional dialogue to harmonize public policies, technical capacity building in areas like e-money governance, interoperability, consumer protection, and financial literacy, and advocacy for regulatory reforms that promote competition and strengthen digital infrastructure. The partnership also involves creating a digital center of excellence.
Earlier in 2025, Gabon partnered with Visa to develop digital solutions for modernizing tax collection, automating government disbursements, and deploying a secure digital identity system. Separately, MENDI formed a partnership with Africa 50, a pan-African infrastructure investment platform, to support the digitization of payments, digital education, and national network expansion.
Gabon also launched SIGFIP, an Integrated Public Financial Management System, in January 2026, centralizing all tax, customs, procurement, and public spending on a single digital platform. And MaDigiPaie, a national digital payments hub, is being used to integrate electronic payments into government services, starting with the e-Visa system.
These efforts are aligned with the National Growth and Development Plan (PNCD 2026–2030) and the CEMAC Regional Financial Inclusion Strategy (2023–2027).
Several conditions make Gabon a potentially interesting candidate for open banking adoption within the CEMAC region:
High mobile connectivity provides a strong demand-side foundation. With 87% mobile phone ownership and nearly 70% internet access, the digital infrastructure to support API-based financial services is better developed than in most CEMAC peers.
The mobile money ecosystem is active and growing. With $7 billion in mobile money transactions in 2024 and three active operators (plus new entrants like Gozem planning expansion into Gabon), there is a meaningful base of digital financial activity to build upon.
A working data protection framework is already in place. The 2023 update to Gabon’s data protection law introduced provisions on data portability and consent that align with some of the prerequisites for an open data or open banking regime.
Government digitalization momentum is strong. The pace of partnerships, platform launches, and regulatory updates since 2025 signals a government willing to invest in digital infrastructure and institutional coordination.
Regional interoperability is advancing. GIMACPAY and the ISO 20022 mandate provide the beginnings of standardized financial messaging that could, in time, support structured data sharing across institutions.
Open banking could help expand credit access by enabling alternative data-based credit scoring, particularly for the estimated 40–50% of GDP that currently operates informally. It could also deepen competition in a banking market that remains highly concentrated.
The biggest barrier is the absence of any regulatory framework for open banking at either the national or regional level. BEAC has not introduced guidelines on API standards, data sharing, or third-party provider access, and Gabon has no national-level open banking directive.
Banking concentration is a structural challenge. In a market where one institution controls over 70% of new lending, incumbent incentives to open systems to third-party competitors are minimal.
The CEMAC regulatory architecture, while centralizing key functions under BEAC and COBAC, also creates complexity. National governments like Gabon have limited autonomy to push ahead independently on frameworks like open banking, which would likely need to be harmonized across all six member states.
Fintech licensing requirements under BEAC remain onerous. High regulatory fees, geographic restrictions on payment instruments (PSPs cannot process transactions outside the CEMAC zone), and complex integration requirements for systems like GIMACPAY raise barriers for smaller players.
Despite strong mobile phone penetration, financial literacy and consumer awareness around data sharing, consent, and digital rights remain limited, particularly outside Libreville and Port-Gentil. Dense rainforest terrain also limits physical and digital infrastructure deployment in rural areas.
Finally, while Gabon’s digital programs are ambitious, the 5th eGabon Steering Committee in February 2026 acknowledged that fund disbursement rates remain too low to produce tangible results, and inter-departmental coordination needs strengthening.
Gabon is not building an open banking framework. What it is building is a wider digital finance infrastructure that could, over time, support one. The combination of a modernized data protection law, growing mobile money ecosystems, regional interoperability systems, and active government digitalization programs puts Gabon in a stronger starting position than most CEMAC countries.
The realistic path to open banking in Gabon runs through BEAC. Any formal framework would likely be introduced regionally, not nationally, and the current focus at the BEAC level remains on payments modernization, not data sharing. But if the ingredients continue to develop at the national level, Gabon could be well-positioned to pilot or adopt open banking principles when the regional conversation evolves.
For now, the country’s focus on digitizing public services, expanding mobile money access, and strengthening the regulatory and institutional ecosystem for digital finance is the right groundwork. Whether that groundwork eventually supports a formal open banking regime will depend on both national execution and regional regulatory ambition.
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.
