truID attended the Open Finance Africa Symposium held in Cape Town – an intimate two-day gathering of around 50 delegates hosted by Cenfri and CGAP. The room brought together regulators, policymakers, financial sector stakeholders, and development partners to evaluate the opportunities, challenges, and implementation pathways for open finance across the African continent. Over two days, we heard directly from regulators preparing to implement open finance – including the Central Bank of Kenya, the Bank of Zambia, the National Bank of Rwanda, and FSCA South Africa – alongside Kenya’s Data Protection Commission and the Nigeria Data Protection Commission.
We were honoured to be in a room with the most important decision-makers shaping open finance on the continent – and to represent truID as South Africa’s largest and most established proxy for open finance, and the only data aggregator invited. We came to share our experience and challenges, and to learn from those further along. I left with a much deeper understanding of how open finance is playing out in Brazil, India and the UAE – what has worked, what hasn’t, and what possibilities have emerged in these markets.
Africa has a chance to move faster than the markets that built the playbook, precisely because the lessons are now sitting there for the taking. Wallet and bank transaction data are the datasets that can unlock financial inclusion for tens of millions of people.
A few things stuck with me.
What Cenfri’s opening made clear
Cenfri’s Jeremy Gray opened the symposium with a clear-eyed read on where Africa stands. A few things stood out:
The biggest Open Finance opportunity lies beyond payments. The presentation highlighted that while many current API initiatives focus on commercially safe use cases such as payments, app-based account access, and convenience features, the real opportunity for Africa lies in high-impact inclusion use cases. Open Finance has the potential to significantly improve credit access, SME finance, fraud prevention, onboarding, and personal financial management – particularly for underserved and financially excluded communities.
Source: Jeremy Gray, Cenfri
Consumer data ownership remains a critical issue. A major theme throughout the presentation was that consumers may theoretically own their financial data, but in practice, large institutions still largely determine who can access that data, under what conditions, and for which commercial purposes. This highlights the importance of building consumer-centric frameworks that prioritise consent, transparency, trust, and interoperability.
Open Finance is not just a technology project. The presentation strongly emphasised that APIs alone are not enough to create successful Open Finance ecosystems. Long-term success will require governance structures, dispute resolution mechanisms, trust frameworks, standards bodies, conformance testing, technical working groups, and coordinated regulatory oversight. Africa’s growing focus on these foundational building blocks reflects a positive and maturing approach toward building secure, inclusive, and interoperable financial ecosystems.
A snapshot of open finance progress in Africa
Cenfri’s opening also gave us a clear snapshot of where the African continent stands today. Globally, open banking and open finance frameworks are moving fast – mandated, standardised, or under guided implementation across much of North America, Europe, the UK, Australia, Brazil, India, the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Africa, by contrast, is largely in earlier stages of implementation – but every market on the continent is actively moving.
Source: Jeremy Gray, Cenfri
A snapshot of progress across the continent:
- Nigeria – The CBN announced in April 2025 that Open Banking would officially launch in August 2025, after years of regulatory framework and operational guidelines.
- Ghana – In January 2025, the Bank of Ghana issued a draft Open Banking Directive.
- Kenya – The Central Bank of Kenya conducted a readiness assessment in 2025, with ongoing work on an implementation roadmap.
- Rwanda – The National Bank of Rwanda published a position paper in 2025 and launched a technical committee responsible for developing API standards.
- Zambia – The Bank of Zambia received approval to publish an Open Finance position paper and move forward with a building block phase.
- South Africa – South African regulators are in the process of concluding a cost-benefit study to inform a policy paper and roadmap for implementation.
No African market has gone live yet. Nigeria is closest. The rest are at varying stages – position papers, draft directives, technical committees, feasibility studies. The direction of travel is unmistakable.
Brazil is Open Finance at scale. We should be paying close attention
Maria Paula Arregui from Mercado Pago took us behind the scenes of Brazil’s Open Finance ecosystem – the largest in the Global South.
Like South Africa, before Open Finance in Brazil the market experience high banking concentration, a significantly large unbanked population and data silos controlled by incumbents. Financial inclusion rates were low and competition was struggling.
Source: Paula Arregui, Mercado Pago – Before Open Finance
Fast forward 4 years and the results are incredible and speak for themselves. Brazil has achieved Open Finance at significant scale:
Source: Source: Paula Arregui, Mercado Pago – After Open Finance
The presentation showed that Open Finance is no longer simply a regulatory initiative or technology experiment – it can become a core layer of financial infrastructure that reshapes competition, innovation, and financial inclusion at a national scale.
The opportunity for Africa to build around its own realities. A major theme throughout the presentation was that African markets should not simply replicate Europe or other developed-market models, but instead design Open Finance ecosystems around Africa’s unique financial landscape. Mercado Pago emphasised the importance of building for the informal economy, where transactional data, mobile money activity, and alternative financial data can become critical entry points for expanding financial inclusion.
Where open finance is live, the outcomes speak for themselves
Maria Fernandez Vidal from CGAP shared survey results from CGAP’s nationally representative surveys India and Brazil, and the numbers were hard to argue with.
- 49% of Brazilian consumers adopted Open Finance to increase their credit limits, while 28.7% cited the convenience of centralising accounts and financial management.
- 97% of Indian consumers who used consent-based data sharing found it beneficial, with the biggest drivers being better loan terms, higher loan amounts, and easier access to financial products.
- 100% of Indian lenders surveyed reported improvements in assessing customer creditworthiness using Open Finance data, while 90% reported improved post-disbursement credit risk management.
- Among Indian financial institutions participating in Open Finance:
– 81% cited real-time access to data as a key benefit,
– 74% cited improved risk assessment,
– and 83% reported competitive advantages from participation.
- Open Finance is also proving impactful beyond lending:
– 85% of Indian PFM users reported improved financial management,
– 90% improved ability to achieve financial goals,
– and 85% reported increased financial confidence.
It is encouraging to see – because this is the exact work we are doing at truID in South Africa. Credit is where Open Finance moves the needle hardest – but the personal financial management story is just as strong.
Source: Maria Vidal, CGAP – Impact for Consumers
Source: Maria Vidal, CGAP – Impact for Providers
The UAE is building an Open Economy, not just Open Banking
Jonathan Holman from Nebras shared how the UAE is positioning Open Finance as a centrally coordinated “Open Economy” infrastructure layer – spanning banking, insurance, FX, e-wallets, embedded finance, payments, and AI-driven services – rather than simply an Open Banking API framework.
Unlike many regions where Open Banking evolved through fragmented bilateral integrations and disconnected standards, the UAE is building:
- centralised consent infrastructure,
- centralised trust frameworks,
- centralised authentication,
- dispute management,
- standardised customer experiences,
- interoperable payments,
- and extensible APIs as part of a single coordinated ecosystem.
Would this work for Africa?Africa will likely evolve through a more federated and market-driven model than the UAE, but the UAE demonstrates how centralised coordination can accelerate interoperability, trust, and ecosystem-wide innovation.
What would make Africa move faster
Across the two days – and pulling from the experience of Brazil, India and the UAE – five things kept coming up as the design choices that accelerate Open Finance adoption.
- Mandate participation of systemic players, with reciprocity. Voluntary regimes stall. Brazil compelled the big incumbents to share, and made reciprocity the price of access – anyone reading data must also share data. Without this, closed ecosystems entrench and never open up.
- Phase the scope – don’t try to do everything at once. Brazil ran four phases over four years: product data → consented customer data → payment initiation → insurance, FX and pensions. The UAE followed the same iterative model. Phasing lets regulators fix what breaks before raising the stakes, and lets participants invest gradually.
- Centralise infrastructure rather than asking each firm to build its own. The UAE’s centralised model delivered roughly 1/3 the cost at 4x the scope of fragmented builds – and went from regulation to launch in 12 months. Centralisation covers consent management, authentication, monitoring, standards, and value-added services.
- Standardise the consent experience across every institution. Consumers should learn the consent flow once, not 800 times. Brazil and the UAE both built one consent experience that travels with the customer. The Nigerian and Kenyan Data Protection Commissions added the prescription: consent must be explicit, time-bound, and revocable, supported by transparency dashboards.
- Industry-led governance, not just regulation. Brazil’s Open Finance Brasil association – industry-run, fast, pragmatic, owned by participants – runs the technical standards. Without this layer, regulators end up doing technical work they’re not built to do, and timelines stretch.
South Africa’s API landscape is fragmented – and needs urgent regulatory attention
South Africa’s open finance ecosystem remains fragmented and largely market-driven.
While certain banks have begun introducing APIs, access remains inconsistent across the industry. Some institutions provide varying levels of API capability, while others still offer limited or no meaningful third-party data access at all. Even where APIs exist, there is little standardisation around consent, pricing, security requirements, onboarding processes, data scope, or who may participate in the ecosystem.
The result is a deeply uneven open finance environment where access to consumer-permissioned financial data depends heavily on which bank a consumer uses.
This matters because financial inclusion is ultimately a data problem.
Without standardised and interoperable access to financial data, lenders struggle to assess thin-file consumers, fintechs struggle to innovate, and millions of South Africans remain financially invisible despite being economically active.
In the absence of universally accessible APIs, consumer-permissioned screen scraping continues to serve as a critical bridge within the ecosystem – enabling access to financial data where no viable alternative exists today.
Encouragingly, one of the clearest themes emerging from the symposium was the growing urgency among regulators and industry participants to accelerate South Africa’s digital financial infrastructure.
Part of this evolution is likely to include the SARB-led PEMKey initiative and the broader Digital Financial Identity framework – creating a reusable identity and consent layer that could eventually underpin secure, interoperable open finance participation across the country.
Source: truID – Under the Hood
Where this leaves us
Financial inclusion is ultimately a data problem.
The consumers already exist. The transactions already exist. The mobile wallets, bank accounts and digital payment rails already exist. What remains fragmented is the infrastructure that lets consumers permission that data – safely and interoperably – across the financial system.
What was encouraging at the symposium was how seriously Open Finance is being treated across the African regulatory landscape. Regulators across the continent are no longer asking whether it matters. They are working out how to implement it.
That shift matters.
Africa no longer needs to speculate about what Open Finance could become. Brazil, India and the UAE have already shown the scale, the inclusion outcomes, and the economic impact that interoperable data-sharing can unlock.
Africa now has a chance to move faster than the markets that built the first playbook. The demand exists. The technology exists. The regulatory momentum is building. The private sector is ready.
What matters now is how quickly interoperable frameworks, trust layers and data-sharing standards take shape – to unlock the next phase of financial inclusion across the continent.
Open Finance is not the end goal. It is the layer on which financial inclusion will be built.
With sincere thanks to Cenfri and CGAP for hosting an informative and collaborative symposium.