Nigeria just opened banking

*pans camera to fintechs doing their victory dance

Following a series of decisions and walkbacks, Nigeria’s Central Bank (CBN) has finally given open banking—a system that enables third-party sharing of customer data by banks—a nod. It has taken eight long hard years but it’s finally here. 

Why it matters: This approval lets you consent to allowing regulated financial institutions to access your data, such as account balance (don’t be shy👀), transaction history, and spending patterns, and in some cases, initiate transactions on your behalf. 

This data will be shared through a standardised API that all banks and participating institutions can connect to, enabling secure and consistent access.

For you (customers), it means better and more personalised financial products. For banks, it means a new wave of competition from fintechs.

Why it’s a big deal: Nigeria has struggled with credit access—despite the troves of consumer transaction data sitting idle. Today, up to 70% of account holders still can’t access credit. With open banking in play, fintechs and banks can securely share user data, better assess creditworthiness, and unlock more inclusive lending.

This is a game-changer for startups like Mono, OnePipe, and others whose core business depends on seamless access to banking data.

Banks must now begin open banking implementation by August 1, 2025.

It sucks to be Elon Musk (don't take that literally).

Only weeks ago, he was basking in multiple wins: Starlink launched in crisis-torn Somalia and Lesotho under serendipitous circumstances. To add to his wins, fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos, who owns Amazon's Kuiper—a low-earth orbit (LEO) satellite internet company—seemed to be having a problem launching his rockets. Bad weather torpedoed them from lifting.

It was pretty good going for Musk until April 28, at 7.01 PM Eastern Time (ET), when Kuiper finally launched those satellites into space—27 of them. With those satellites in space, Kuiper will accelerate its plans to bring satellite internet to Africa. Its starting point will be in South Africa, where it already has a partnership with Vodacom, a telecom operator in the country owned by Vodafone.

South Africa has eluded Starlink and Musk due to its insistence that 30% of foreign ventures must be owned by Black and/or historically disadvantaged groups. In plain terms, Musk has declined to do that.

Yet, with the Vodacom partnership, Kuiper could get the nod ahead of Starlink. From precedent, we know Starlink has not considered partnerships when expanding into new countries. However, this is not something Bezos and Kuiper seem to mind—and that might just do the trick.

While the arms race between the two satellite internet companies is generating buzz in the media, South Africa is not a greenfield market for satellite internet service providers (ISPs). The country already houses multiple satellite internet providers—including VSAT (35% market share), YahClick (25%), Openserve Satellite (20%), and Q-KON (15%)—that serve both business and residential markets. 

Kuiper and Starlink will have their work cut out for them as they battle tenured and well-entrenched geostationary (GEO) satellite providers in South Africa.

For Musk, he still has a bit of a regulatory hurdle to fix.

Financial players seem to think that stablecoins are the future of payments. Why not? They're new, they're different, and the opportunities for real-time settlement are endless since they operate on the blockchain, which no one entity controls. 

On April 28, Mastercard, the payments giant, partnered with OKX, the Seychelles-based crypto exchange, to launch OKX cards. The cards will allow users to spend their crypto on everyday purchases like it's their regular paper money. This move comes only months after Mastercard partnered with MetaMask and Baanx to introduce crypto payments.

Here’s what it looks like: when you shop online with your crypto-enabled OKX card (issued by Mastercard), if the item is priced in USD, you can pay with crypto from your card, and a payment processor like Circle aggregates the payment from crypto to fiat money—using the real-time price of the stablecoin to USD.

Sounds pretty fantastic!

Of course, opening this up to an exchange as popular as OKX, with 1 million+ users, will increase the adoption across board, exposing more average Joes to the crypto ecosystem. The excitement could trigger greenhorns—or normies in crypto-speak—to come into the crypto ecosystem. Online merchants will now look cool when they slap “We accept stablecoin payments” all over their marketing boards.

However, the case might be a bit different for Nigerian users. 

OKX fled the Nigerian market after a government clampdown on foreign exchanges in 2024. However, one might question if this is a real opportunity for Mastercard to open up this new stablecoin-enabled payment option to Nigerian crypto startups.

If the signs are anything to go by, the increasing transaction volumes in stablecoins month-on-month (MoM) show there's real interest and consideration in the digital asset. In Nigeria, Web3 payment startups are already exploring ways to break the usage barrier for crypto to become a form of “money.”

Mastercard leading this charge helps further this cause. And to the blue side of Mastercard's red Rubicon, competitor Visa has never hidden its admiration for crypto and stablecoin payments. 

With traditional financial (TradFi) players increasingly changing their body language, the only thing Africa and the world need to finally figure out—somehow—is regulation.

This is hard. Central authorities want to do their job: to maintain monetary and economic stability. Any new, different form of money that is adopted widely—and not under their control—could undermine their mandate to fulfill this role.

So, while stablecoins are moving fast, the people who call the shots haven't blown the whistle. Bummer.