Madagascar is a large, mostly rural economy where mobile money has outpaced traditional banking, and open banking is not yet on the table. There is no national framework, but as a member of the Southern African payment systems the island is tied into regional interoperability efforts that will shape whatever comes next.
Banking reaches only a small share of Madagascar’s population, and cash still dominates in much of the country. The real growth in digital finance has come from mobile money, led by MVola, Orange Money, and Airtel Money, which together reach far more people than bank branches do. As elsewhere in the region, the mobile wallet is the main gateway to formal financial services.
The regulator is the Banque Centrale de Madagascar (BFM). Its focus is monetary stability and the steady modernisation of payments rather than open banking. As a member of the Southern African Development Community, Madagascar is connected to the region’s payment systems: SADC-RTGS, the real-time settlement system run by the South African Reserve Bank, and TCIB, the low-value cross-border instant payment scheme that bridges into the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System. Those regional rails are where the island’s payments future is being shaped.
There is no open banking framework in Madagascar and no roadmap for one. With low formal inclusion, a largely cash and mobile-money economy, and a payments system still maturing, the preconditions for consent-based data sharing are not yet in place. The honest position is early-stage.
For Madagascar, the near-term work is expanding mobile money, deepening bank access, and strengthening ties to the regional payment systems. As interoperability improves through SADC infrastructure and more people move onto digital rails, the country slowly builds the base that open banking would eventually need.
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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.
