By Lauren Jones, Open Banking Lead at Paylume.
From mobile money’s breakthrough to continental payment rails, Africa is writing its own playbook for open finance, one that must account for 1.4 billion people, 54 regulatory regimes, and a legacy of exclusion.
The story of finance on the African continent has never followed a straight line, skipping the era of branch-based retail banking and pioneering mobile money. M-Pesa in Kenya became the template that policymakers from the Philippines to Peru still study, but the next chapter demands something more systemic. The architecture of open finance, the interoperability of payment rails, and the harmonisation of regulatory frameworks across borders that move at very different speeds.
Open finance is arriving in Africa at a moment of extraordinary possibility, and extraordinary fragility. The continent is home to the world’s fastest-growing fintech sector, yet more than one in four people in sub-Saharan Africa still lack access to basic financial services. The challenge for regulators and innovators alike is to build the infrastructure of data portability without replicating the exclusions of the systems that came before.
Understanding the African context
Africa is experiencing a resilient economic expansion, with the African economy experiencing a 4.2% real GDP growth compared to the global average of 3.1%, and with a projected growth of 4.7% by 2027. 21 African countries are projected to exceed 5% growth in 2025, with Ethiopia, Niger, Rwanda, and Senegal potentially reaching the 7% threshold considered necessary for meaningful poverty reduction. However, the divergence within Africa is stark. East Africa leads with projected growth of 5.9% for 2025–2026, while Southern Africa will grow at only 2.2%, with South Africa expected to achieve just 0.8%.
It is also the youngest continent with a median age of 20 and a predicted youth population of 830 million (doubling from today), and a working age population of 1.56 billion by 2050. The African continent will have 42% of all youth worldwide by 2030. However, that is marked against a 20% youth unemployment rate which is twice the global average.
Digital connectivity is the bridge between the demographic dividend and economic opportunity. The overall number of internet users on the continent has jumped to around 646 million, from close to 181 million in 2014, with users expected to surpass 1.1 billion by 2029. That trajectory, combined with the youngest population on earth, is what could make Africa the defining growth story of the coming decades.
Why open finance matters differently in Africa
In the United Kingdom or Brazil, open banking debates tend to centre on fintech innovation and competition between incumbents. The average British adult already has a bank account; the question often is whether a challenger bank can see their salary deposits or savings. In Africa, the stakes are more fundamental.
“There’s no point talking about savings tools when there’s no money to save. People in Nigeria need access to affordable, responsible lending, and lenders need to reduce the risk of lending to achieve this.”
That quote, from an industry practitioner noted in research on Nigeria and Ghana, cuts to the core of what open finance could unlock on the continent – credit. When a smallholder farmer in Uganda has a two-year transaction history on a mobile money wallet, portable, consented data can create a credit score beyond traditional bureaus.. Open finance, in this context, is not about better budgeting apps, but collateral-free lending at scale. Small and medium-sized enterprises in Africa face high loan service costs, with interest rates often exceeding 30% in countries like Ghana and ranging from 18% to 35% in South Africa, significantly hindering growth and expansion. Collaborations between banks, telcos, and fintech companies that leverage data to streamline lending, reduce costs and address the liquidity gaps can be supported by initiatives like open finance.
The OECD, in its 2024 report on open finance in sub-Saharan Africa, identified a clear trajectory. African countries are consciously moving beyond the narrow “open banking” definition (sharing account data between banks and third parties) toward the wider “open finance” agenda, encompassing insurance, pensions, savings and mobile money. The reason is structural. In markets where telcos like Safaricom and MTN hold larger customer bases than many banks, a regime limited to banking data leaves the most valuable financial data, mobile money transactions, outside the sharing framework entirely.
These factors must be considered when analysing the implementation of open finance across the continent. Lifting and replacing UK or European models will not work.
The regulatory map
Across the continent’s 54 nations, regulatory progress on open finance is uneven, but the direction of travel is relatively consistent.
Nigeria
Most advanced
The Central Bank of Nigeria introduced Africa’s first structured open banking framework in February 2021, followed by an implementation plan outlining technical standards and governance. However, the rollout of live APIs and central infrastructure has been delayed.
South Africa
Active development
The FSCA published a draft Open Finance Position Paper in 2023 and has been finalising guidelines. Major banks like Standard Bank have been piloting APIs since 2023, giving the country a market-led head start alongside slow-forming regulation.
Namibia
Active development
Namibia’s National Payment System Vision 2021–2025 identified open banking as a cornerstone for fostering consumer-centric, innovative payment solutions and Nambia released its official Open Banking Standards in April 2025.
Kenya
In consultation
The Central Bank of Kenya’s National Payment System Vision and Strategy 2021–2025 frames “open infrastructure” as a core objective and commits to defining API standards for identification, data access, and transaction initiation.
Rwanda
Draft directive
Rwanda released a draft Open Banking directive in December 2024 as part of its Five-Year Digital Economy Strategy, with technical standards planned for implementation in 2025.
Ghana
Sandbox phase
The Bank of Ghana’s Payment Systems Strategy (2019–2024) established data-sharing standards as a strategic initiative. A regulatory sandbox launched in 2023 is testing open banking models, though formal regulation lags.
Egypt
Guidelines issued
Egypt’s Central Bank introduced open banking guidelines in 2023, focusing on fintech integration. Payment giant Fawry already operates APIs serving 39 million monthly users, giving the country a significant commercial base.
Only 11 of Africa’s 54 countries have formal open finance regulations or pilots, but momentum is stronger than the statistic suggests. In many markets, fintechs and telcos are already driving open banking commercially. For example, Safaricom’s Daraja API opened M-Pesa to developers, though such initiatives remain fragmented and non-standardised.
The East African Payments Masterplan: a blueprint for regional convergence
Perhaps the most significant convergence initiative currently underway is the East African Community’s Cross-Border Payment System Masterplan. This is a framework that may change how we think about open finance at a regional level.
EAC Cross-Border Payments Masterplan
Adopted by the EAC central bank governors, the Masterplan sets out a sequenced programme to make cross-border payments across EAC Partner States faster, safer, cheaper, and more transparent.
Crucially, the Masterplan is not merely about building payment rails. It is designed as a holistic set of building blocks: from harmonised KYC standards and regulatory frameworks, to the modernisation of wholesale RTGS connections, to retail interoperability that allows mobile money users to transact seamlessly across borders. The East African Payment System (EAPS) already connects four Partner States’ RTGS systems for wholesale payments. The Masterplan charts the path to a full retail and digital layer above that foundation.
The commercial logic is stark: MicroSave Consulting estimates the East African cross-border payments market at approximately $329 billion in 2025, with projections of reaching $1 trillion by 2035. Intra-regional tourism accounts for roughly 40% of East African travel, further underscoring the daily demand for frictionless cross-border money movement.
On the ground, the Masterplan’s ambitions are already visible in commercial innovation. I&M Bank’s IMBRISK initiative, launched in late 2025, allows customers to deposit, withdraw, and transfer money at any I&M branch in Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, and Rwanda regardless of where their primary account is held. A direct commercial expression of the regional integration the Masterplan envisions.
PAPSS: the continental settlement layer
The East African Masterplan fits within a larger continental architecture anchored by the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS), launched by Afreximbank under the African Continental Free Trade Area framework and adopted by the African Union as the official settlement platform for AfCFTA transactions.
By 2025, PAPSS had expanded to connect 19 countries across four regions, with over 150 commercial banks and 14 national payment switches on the platform, including a significant new presence in North Africa, with Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, and Tunisia integrated. The system’s stated ambition is to save the continent more than $5 billion annually in transaction costs previously lost to dollar-denominated correspondent banking routes and currency conversion fees.
2025 marked a turning point for PAPSS. In June, the “PAPSSCARD”, Africa’s first continental card scheme, was launched. This aimed at challenging the dominance of Visa and Mastercard by keeping card processing, fees, and data within African institutions. Soon after the “PAPSS African Currency Marketplace” (PACM) went live, enabling direct peer-to-peer exchange of African currencies without converting to dollars as an intermediary.
What successful open finance actually requires
Data governance and consent infrastructure
Open finance requires individuals to meaningfully consent to data sharing but in markets where smartphone penetration remains partial and digital literacy is uneven the consent models designed for European or East Asian contexts may not translate. Cenfri’s work with the National Bank of Rwanda and the Bank of Zambia has surfaced this explicitly: implementation roadmaps must account for alternative consent mechanisms suited to feature phone users and lower-literacy populations. The OECD report likewise notes that African countries may need to “steer away from open banking toward open finance frameworks” that are more context appropriate.
API standardisation across borders
The fundamental tension in African open finance is between local innovation and cross-border scale, which demands standardisation. A fintech integrating M-Pesa in Kenya and MTN MoMo in Ghana today must write two separate codebases and navigate entirely distinct compliance flows. The Open Finance African Group has been working on regional API standards, but progress is constrained by limited funding and coordination capacity. For fintechs to be able to scale across borders, a level of regional harmonisation becomes important. The EAC Masterplan’s emphasis on harmonised frameworks provides a policy lever that commercial coordination alone cannot replicate.
The telco-bank divide
Payments in Africa belong disproportionately to telcos. Nigeria’s NIBSS processed over $1 trillion in transactions in 2024, but across much of the continent, mobile money operators are the primary custodians of transaction data. An open finance framework that only reaches bank accounts misses the financial histories of tens of millions of mobile money users. Effective frameworks must integrate telco data into the open finance perimeter, which requires both regulatory will and commercial negotiation with some of the continent’s largest corporations.
The unbanked data problem
A rich underlying data set is essential for successful open banking. In Ghana, where less than 40% of adults held a bank account as of 2023, the value of open finance depends on first building the data layer meaning drawing in the informal economy, the smallholder farmers, the market traders, before portability becomes meaningful. This is where initiatives like Mastercard’s Community Pass (already reaching 1.2 million smallholder farmers in Uganda by 2025) and its Farm Pass digitisation programme become part of the open finance story. Building the data bedrock is vital for that future data sharing.
It is not without its risk
The optimism that surrounds open finance on the continent must be weighed against genuine risks. Data privacy breaches become more consequential as financial data becomes more portable. Consumer harm is a realistic concern in markets where consumer protection enforcement is still developing, with some nations still drafting consumer protection regulations. Cenfri’s work emphasises that open finance implementation “typically unfolds in phases over five to seven years,” requiring regulators to resist pressure to move faster than their oversight capacity allows.
There is also the risk of exacerbating inequality. If open finance frameworks are designed primarily around smartphone-based consent interfaces, urban broadband connectivity, and formal employment records, they may deepen the financial exclusion of the populations they were meant to serve. The design choices made across the continent over the next three to five years will determine whether Africa’s open finance moment is genuinely inclusive or whether it creates a two-tier system that serves the already-served.
What could the future hold
Unlike Europe’s harmonised framework, Africa’s open finance landscape spans 54 national systems, increasingly linked by emerging regional initiatives. Platforms like PAPSS, AfCFTA, and the EAC Masterplan are gradually building the infrastructure for a more integrated continental financial market.
The political will exists. The commercial incentive is clear. The technical tools are available. What remains hardest is the coordination problem, persuading central banks with different priorities, telcos with different incentives, and fintechs with different geographies to align on standards and data governance that serve the full population not just its most connected.
When we talk about open banking, we’re not just talking about data access. We should be talking about opening financial opportunities and giving people real access to financial tools they have been locked out of for too long. The continent that gave the world M-Pesa has the ingenuity and the urgency to make it real. Whether the infrastructure, the regulation, and the investment converge quickly enough remains the defining question of African open finance in the next decade.
