Nigeria might be approaching open banking the wrong way.
Yes, we’ve built the foundation and ticked some regulatory boxes, yet awareness and impact are still crawling. After nearly eight years of conversations, too many people still see open banking as one more regulation being pushed from the top. Maybe that’s where we’re getting it wrong. Open banking was never meant to be just another innovation; it’s being built to solve real problems and make everyday life easier. But that message hasn’t landed.
At Open Banking Nigeria, we believe the wins that matter aren’t technical at all. They show up when people’s lives get better, when businesses can grow without stress, and when credit stops being a privilege for a small, well‑documented minority. If, after all our effort, millions still struggle to pay, borrow, or save with any sense of ease, then we haven’t really achieved what we set out to do.
So the real question is: what should success look like for open banking in Nigeria?
Beyond the numbers
In many parts of the world, progress in open banking is commonly measured by the numbers. The volume of API calls, average system uptime, and the number of banks that have joined the ecosystem. Those figures are important, but they rarely tell you if anything meaningful has changed for the industry.
If all banks and fintechs are technically “connected” but no new innovations are improving customer experience, what exactly are we celebrating? Numbers matter, yes. They track growth and effort. But they can also distract us from the point of it all.
We’ve chosen to look at success differently. We look for improvements that people can feel. Are more Nigerians able to access credit? Are payments faster, safer, and less stressful? Are more businesses thriving because data is flowing where it should? These are the real metrics, and without them, all the dashboards in the world won’t tell the full story.
The success of open banking in Nigeria hinges on two major outcomes: access to credit and growth in commerce. These will tell us when open banking has truly worked.
KPI 1: Productive Credit
Without credit, dreams remain dreams, and Nigeria knows this too well. We’ve lived too long with unrealized potential for us to keep ignoring this problem.
You do not need research to confirm that Nigerians are entrepreneurial. Walk through any market, sit in Lagos traffic, or scroll through social media, and you will find people creating, selling, fixing, teaching, or inventing. What’s missing, repeatedly, is the fuel needed to scale. Today, less than one‑third of Nigerian adults have access to formal loans. It is not because they lack ideas or discipline; it is because lenders lack confidence. Traditional credit systems simply do not have enough reliable data to see most people clearly. Income is irregular, documentation is thin, and when money goes out, it doesn’t always come back. That uncertainty raises the risk premium, interest rates rise to cover expected losses, and a huge segment of the population remains unattractive on paper. That’s exactly the problem open banking should solve from the first year after implementation.
When customer data becomes accessible, lenders gain the visibility they need to assess risk with precision. With this transparency comes trust, and ultimately, credit becomes more affordable, more accessible, and more productive.
KPI 2: Payments and Commerce
While card payments still dominate, they have reached a natural limit: expensive to issue, unreliable for many users, and dependent on weak infrastructure. Anyone who has tried paying online knows the frustration of declined transactions, excessive charges, and missing OTPs; the system was never built for scale in environments like ours. And beyond cards, most of our other existing payment flows are still heavily push-based. The burden is on the customer to initiate every transfer. Merchants can’t easily initiate transactions, which is why recurring payments and subscription models still struggle in Nigeria. This friction constrains commerce.
A country aiming to become a trillion‑dollar economy cannot keep dragging its transactions through narrow, unreliable transaction pipes. For the economy to grow, commerce itself has to expand in volume and fluidity. And we simply can’t have booming commerce without smooth and reliable payments. The point of open banking isn’t to replace existing infrastructure. It’s to build on what works while quietly retiring what doesn’t.
Cards don’t need to disappear; they just need to stop being the only credible option. Push and pull payments can finally coexist, and merchants can initiate payments securely, with customer consent. Buying, selling, subscribing, and transferring all become as routine and fluid as sending a message on WhatsApp.
When payments work seamlessly, customers don’t get stuck at checkout, businesses can scale without battling the infrastructure, and new business models can emerge that actually grow the economy. All of the value will only materialize if people and businesses can exchange value easily and confidently.
Lessons and the true test of impact
We don’t celebrate new policies for what’s written on paper. We celebrate or criticize them for how they actually impact people’s lives. When Nigeria’s telecommunication industry opened up in the early 2000s, the real transformation wasn’t the policy itself, but the fact that more Nigerians could suddenly own mobile phones. Today, we are able to stay connected to friends and family, run businesses, access international markets, and participate in a digitally enabled world. This same logic will define open banking’s legacy. Its success will be measured by what it enables. So, if people won’t feel the impact, then we’re better off not doing it. The defining questions should always be:
How many Nigerians are living better because of it?”
How many businesses expanded because financing became accessible?
How many people have access to credit for education or skills?
How many fintechs have used open banking to build solutions that genuinely improve real customer experience?
If we can answer these questions with convincing, lived‑in examples, then we can say open banking has succeeded.
