The Democratic Republic of the Congo is a vast, under-banked country where mobile money is growing fast, and open banking is not yet on the agenda. Despite sitting in Central Africa, it is part of the Southern African payment systems rather than the CEMAC franc zone, and that is where its regional payments future is anchored.
The DRC is one of Africa’s largest countries by population, but formal banking reaches only a small share of people. Cash still dominates, and the real growth in financial access has come from mobile money, which is expanding quickly across a huge, largely unbanked population. That growth is promising, but bank account ownership and formal financial data remain limited.
The regulator is the Central Bank of the Congo (Banque Centrale du Congo). Its focus is monetary stability and payments modernisation rather than data sharing. Although the DRC is in Central Africa, it is a member of the Southern African Development Community rather than the CEMAC franc zone, so it is connected to SADC-RTGS, the real-time settlement system run by the South African Reserve Bank, and to 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 the DRC and no published roadmap. The priority is expanding mobile money, deepening financial inclusion across a vast territory, and strengthening the payments system rather than mandating consent-based data sharing. The honest position is early-stage, though the pace of mobile money growth is a real asset.
For the DRC, the signal to watch is the continued rapid growth of mobile money and the strengthening of regional payment links. With such a large, young, under-banked population moving onto digital wallets, the country is building a substantial digital-finance base that open banking could eventually draw on.
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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.
