Most people who follow Nigeria’s fintech space would tell you the answer is obvious. Fintechs. They get access to customer data they couldn’t reach before. They can build faster, underwrite smarter, and offer services that simply weren’t possible without a standardized way to connect to banks. They are clearly the ones building on top of this infrastructure, so they must be the ones getting the most out of it. That answer is partially right. But the full picture is more complicated, and in some ways more interesting.
Fintechs do benefit. But it isn’t automatic.
Open banking reduces what fintechs previously spent enormous time and money doing by hand: connecting to individual banks through unofficial channels, maintaining fragile screen-scraping integrations, negotiating one-off data agreements with each institution. A standardized API layer removes most of that overhead. It also opens up a category that barely existed before, financial data as a product, which is how companies like Mono built a business connecting fintechs to bank account data and attracted $17.5 million in funding over several years. But here is the part that gets left out of the pitch. Being a fintech in an open banking ecosystem does not guarantee you survive it. Okra, once described as Nigeria’s answer to Plaid and one of the first companies to prove there was commercial demand for open banking infrastructure here, shut down in May 2025. It had raised $16.5 million, had real institutional clients, and was building exactly the kind of product the ecosystem needed. The delay in going live, combined with currency pressure and the sheer cost of scaling, proved too much. The lesson is not that open banking is bad for fintechs. It is that the infrastructure creates opportunity, not guaranteed returns.
The fintechs that will extract the most from open banking are those solving problems close to the consumer: credit decisioning, account aggregation, personal finance tools, embedded payments. Not the ones building a layer and hoping the use cases materialize around them. In Nigeria’s context, where the credit gap is the most obvious and most painful problem in consumer finance, the fintechs building credit infrastructure on top of consented bank data are probably the most commercially positioned to win.
Banks benefit too, and this surprises people
Banks in every market where open banking has been mandated have responded the same way at first: with resistance. Compliance costs are real. The CMA9 banks in the UK spent enormous sums on implementation. Australian banks spent even more, with such poor consumer uptake that the industry association eventually called the entire regime “a good idea, badly executed.” Nigerian banks are watching all of this and drawing conclusions. Yes, implementation is expensive. Yes, it forces sharing of data that banks have historically kept as a competitive moat. But the banks that have looked at this honestly are starting to see a different possibility. Open banking lets a bank access data from other institutions about its own customers. A bank that currently sees only what moves through its own walls can, with customer consent, see the full financial picture: salary accounts elsewhere, spending patterns across multiple wallets, existing credit obligations. That is not just useful for selling products. It is the difference between lending confidently and lending blind.
There is also the fraud angle. Nigerian banks lost over 52 billion naira to fraud in 2024. Open banking creates a standardized, auditable consent layer that is structurally harder to exploit than the current environment, where screen-scraping, credential sharing, and fragmented authentication are normal. A system where every data request is authenticated, tied to a BVN-linked consent, and logged by NIBSS is not perfect. But it is substantially better than what exists now. And for banks willing to go further, open banking is the foundation of Banking-as-a-Service, where the banking license and infrastructure become a product sold to fintechs building on top. The banks that see this clearly will compete. The ones that treat open banking as compliance alone will pay the implementation cost and capture none of the upside.
Consumers undoubtedly benefit most.
This is the part of the argument that actually matters. Nigeria has about 430 active fintech companies. The CBN framework is built. NIBSS is ready. The technical standards have been in development since 2018. But none of that produces a single benefit for any Nigerian if consumers don’t trust the system enough to share their data. Consider what is actually at stake for the ordinary person. Somewhere between 83% of Nigerians who earn income have no access to formal credit, depending on which survey you look at. The people who do manage to get loans often pay rates that reflect a lender operating with almost no information about who they are lending to. If a lender can see a borrower’s actual income history, spending patterns, and financial behavior with their consent, rather than relying on three months of bank statements or, worse, phone data scraped without meaningful permission, the assessment changes. That is not a minor improvement. For the person who currently can’t get a loan at any reasonable rate, being seen clearly for the first time is the difference between access and exclusion.
The same logic runs through payments. Many Nigerians with accounts at multiple banks manage them the hard way: logging in separately, mentally tracking balances, occasionally sending money to the wrong place. An account aggregation tool built on open banking rails doesn’t require any special innovation, just consented data access and a clear interface. The benefit is immediate and visible.
These gains are real. They’re also diffuse, spread across millions of individual interactions, which is why no single company captures them as easily as the aggregator layer does. The fintech that reduces your loan rate by a few percentage points by using better data is genuinely creating value. It just shows up in your monthly repayment, not in a funding announcement. What global experience shows is that consumer welfare is the largest aggregate benefit from open banking, but it consistently flows slower and to a narrower population than advocates initially hope. In India, where open banking-style data sharing exploded in credit disbursements over the past two years, the gains concentrated among salaried, urban users first. In the UK, seven years in, most consumers still don’t know what open banking is. Nigeria can close that gap faster, but only by design. It requires products that explain themselves, consent flows that normal people can navigate, and use cases that solve problems people already feel rather than problems that only make sense after a lengthy explanation.
The consumer is the gatekeeper
Here is the thing that tends to get lost when this conversation focuses on infrastructure and regulation. Without consumer consent, there is no data sharing. Without data sharing, there are no better products. Without better products, there is no adoption. And without adoption, every company, bank, fintech, regulator, and infrastructure provider in this ecosystem has built something nobody uses. The consumer is not the passive recipient of open banking’s benefits. They are the switch. The entire system goes live or stays dormant based on whether ordinary Nigerians decide to trust it. That means the question of who benefits from open banking is not just an economic question. It is a design question. A consumer trust question. An education and awareness question.
Australia spent years building technically sound infrastructure and got 0.31% of bank customers actively using it, because the system was built for compliance, not for the person staring at a consent screen on their phone. The lesson arrived late and expensively. Nigeria is still pre-launch. That is actually an advantage. We know, before the first consent is given, that systems built around consumer interest outperform systems built around institutional convenience. We know that Nigerians approach new financial services with earned caution, shaped by years of failed promises, fraud incidents, and institutions that did not always behave like they were on the customer’s side. Building for that reality means more than having the right APIs. It means consent screens that are plain enough for a first-generation bank user to understand. It means explaining not just what a company is requesting, but why, and what happens if something goes wrong. It means products that deliver a visible, felt benefit quickly, so that the first experience with open banking creates advocates rather than skeptics.
So who benefits most?
The honest answer: consumers stand to gain the most in aggregate. The welfare improvement from better credit access, fairer pricing, clearer financial visibility, and a more honest relationship with the institutions handling their data is enormous in a market where so many people have been excluded from financial services or served poorly by them. But that benefit does not arrive automatically. Fintechs that build for it will grow. Banks that get serious about it will compete better. The ecosystem as a whole moves on consumer trust. Whether any of this actually reaches the people who need it most depends on whether open banking is built for them or built around them. That is the choice every company entering this space will make, usually not all at once, but in the small decisions about product design, consent language, pricing, and what to do when something goes wrong. Open banking benefits whoever shows up to build it honestly. Nigeria has enough people who need that to happen.
