Sierra Leone does not have an open banking framework, but it has been quietly building the rails that usually come first. The Bank of Sierra Leone has launched a national instant payment switch and pushed banks and mobile money operators to use it, which is the interoperability groundwork any future open banking model would sit on.
Digital finance in Sierra Leone runs largely on mobile money, led by Orange Money and Africell Money, which reach far more people than the formal banking sector. Bank account ownership is low, so for most people the mobile wallet is the entry point to digital payments. That makes interoperability between wallets and banks the central payments challenge, and it is where the central bank has focused.
The regulator is the Bank of Sierra Leone (BSL). Its main payments project is a national instant payment switch, launched to connect banks and mobile money operators so funds can move between them in real time. The BSL moved to mandate use of the national payment switch, pushing the market onto shared infrastructure rather than a patchwork of closed networks. This is the same interoperability layer that open banking depends on elsewhere.
There is no open banking framework in Sierra Leone and no published roadmap for one. With low formal inclusion and a market still consolidating onto the new switch, the preconditions for consent-based data sharing are not yet in place. The honest position is early-stage: the priority is getting the whole market interoperable and moving more activity onto digital rails.
For Sierra Leone, the signal to watch is how fully the national switch is adopted and how much of the mobile money and banking market it brings together. A working, widely used instant payment system is the foundation open banking would build on. Once interoperability is the norm, the move toward data sharing becomes a smaller and more realistic step.
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.
