Malawi has been building shared payment infrastructure for years, but open banking is not yet part of the plan. The Reserve Bank of Malawi oversees a national switch that connects banks and, increasingly, mobile money, and the country is plugged into the Southern African regional payment systems. Open banking would build on that groundwork rather than replace it.
Financial inclusion in Malawi is driven heavily by mobile money, which reaches far more people than the formal banking sector. To connect these networks, the country runs NatSwitch, its national payment switch, which links banks and supports interoperable card and electronic payments. Bringing mobile money and banks onto shared infrastructure is exactly the kind of interoperability that open banking depends on.
The regulator is the Reserve Bank of Malawi (RBM). Its focus is payments modernisation and financial stability rather than data sharing. As a member of the Southern African Development Community, Malawi 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.
There is no open banking framework in Malawi and no published roadmap. The priority is deepening the use of NatSwitch and mobile money and broadening financial inclusion, not writing rules for consent-based data sharing. The honest position is early-stage, with the interoperability foundations further along than the open banking conversation.
For Malawi, the signal to watch is how fully NatSwitch integrates banks and mobile money and how the country’s regional connections develop. A widely used national switch sitting alongside a large mobile money base is a strong foundation, and once interoperability is the norm, the step toward open banking becomes smaller.
Important Links
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.
