Tanzania has one of the most active mobile money markets in Africa, and its instant payment system is now the backbone of that activity. The Bank of Tanzania runs the Tanzania Instant Payment System, which links banks and mobile wallets in real time, and it has been pushing digital payments into everyday use. A dedicated open banking framework is not in place, but the interoperability that open banking needs is already being built.
Digital finance in Tanzania is carried by mobile money. The country had roughly 63.2 million active mobile money wallets by the end of 2024, served by operators like M-Pesa, Airtel Money, Mixx by Yas, and HaloPesa. For most Tanzanians the mobile wallet, not the bank account, is the main financial tool, and that has shaped how the regulator approaches interoperability and data.
The regulator is the Bank of Tanzania, working under the National Payment Systems Act of 2015. Its central project is the Tanzania Instant Payment System (TIPS), a shared real-time infrastructure that lets banks, mobile money operators, and other providers exchange low-value payments instantly and cheaply. Built with support from the Gates Foundation, TIPS is designed to break down the old separation between closed networks, and it is exactly the kind of interoperable rail that open banking would build on.
Rather than legislating for data sharing, Tanzania is focused on getting money moving digitally across the whole system. TIPS is being scaled to bring more banks and wallets onto a single interoperable network, and the government has moved to make digital payments mandatory in several key sectors to push the economy off cash. The near-term goal is reach and interoperability, not consent-based data access.
There is no dedicated open banking framework in Tanzania yet, and no published timeline for one. The building blocks are coming into place through TIPS and the wider payments modernisation, but the formal rules that would let third parties access customer data with permission have not been written. Realistically, open banking here will follow interoperability rather than lead it.
The thing to watch in Tanzania is how far TIPS extends and how deeply digital payments embed across the economy. A mature, fully interoperable instant-payment system sitting on top of one of the continent’s largest mobile money bases is a strong foundation. Once that is in place, the move from interoperability to open banking becomes a much smaller step than it looks today.
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.
