By Al-amin Ajao Olayiwola
August 1, 2025, was supposed to be the day. For a few months that spring, after the Central Bank of Nigeria announced a firm launch date, it looked as though the country would become the first in Africa to run a national open banking regime — the arrangement that lets you tell your bank to share your account data with an app or a lender you trust, without surrendering your password to do it. The date arrived. Nothing switched on. The regulator let it pass and said, in effect, that the system was not yet safe enough to be true.
It would be easy to file that under the familiar heading of African infrastructure delay, and easy to be wrong. The delay was not administrative. By the time the August date slipped, the rules had been settled for years: the CBN published Africa’s first open banking framework in February 2021 and followed it in March 2023 with operational guidelines detailed enough to specify how customer consent must be confirmed and how the resulting access must be secured. What had not been settled — what five industry workstreams were still finishing when they handed their deliverables to the regulator in September 2025, and what pushed the launch into a phased rollout across the middle of 2026 — was the harder question underneath the policy. Not whether Nigerians should be able to share their financial data, but whether the systems doing the sharing could be trusted to stop when told to.
Consider what a single grant of consent sets in motion. You open a budgeting app, and you allow it to read your bank transactions. You do not hand it your money or your login; the bank instead issues a token, a short digital credential that stands for a specific permission — this app, your data, this purpose — that the app presents each time it wants to read something. The Nigerian guidelines are exacting about how that credential comes into being: the customer’s agreement has to be verified with two-factor authentication, and the token has to be encrypted and passed securely between the institution that holds the data and the one that wants it. That part, the yes, is well understood and largely solved. The problem lives on the other side of the decision.
Weeks later you lose interest in the app, or you read something that unsettles you, and you withdraw the permission. In the instant you do, the truth about your consent changes. The token does not. It is still sitting in the app’s records, and quite possibly cached in a service somewhere between the app and your bank that was told, not long ago, that this credential was good. Your bank’s own systems may be holding their own copy of that judgement, kept close for the sake of speed, because rechecking every request against a central authority is expensive and slow. Revocation — the act of cancelling the credential — only means anything if the cancellation outruns all of those copies. The gap between the moment you say no and the moment every system actually honours it is not a technicality. It is a live window in which your data can still be read against your wishes, and the whole moral claim of open banking depends on making that window vanishingly small.
This is the part outsiders underestimate, because it inverts the intuition. Granting access feels like the sensitive act; withdrawing it feels like housekeeping. In engineering, it is the reverse. Authorisation is a handshake everyone is motivated to complete. Revocation is a message nobody downstream is in a hurry to receive, propagating through systems that were deliberately built to avoid asking permission twice. Every design choice that makes the ordinary case fast — long-lived tokens, cached approvals, trust extended and then remembered — is a choice that makes the moment of withdrawal harder to enforce. A credential that lives for hours is cheap and smooth and keeps working long after it should be dead. One that lives for seconds dies almost the instant you revoke it, but forces the network into a constant, costly interrogation of whether each permission still holds. The real work is finding the settlement between those two, and in a centralised design like Nigeria’s — where a public registry, operated by the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System, sits at the middle of the arrangement — that settlement has a natural home. The registry and the shared standards around it can become the authority every participant checks against, quickly, rather than relying on a copy each made earlier and forgot to question. Whether that check is fast enough to make revocation feel instant, and honest enough that it never green-lights a permission a customer has already pulled, is one of the two things the launch has to get right before it can be switched on for real.
The second thing is subtler and, in a rollout this size, more treacherous, because when it fails it does so without a sound. Open banking only works if every institution presents its data in the same agreed shape — the same fields, named the same way, meaning the same things — so that any approved company can read any bank without building a separate bespoke bridge to each one. Engineers call that agreed shape a schema, but the plainer word is contract. The contract says a transaction record will carry these particular pieces of information, in this order, standing for these particular things, and as long as everyone keeps to it the whole arrangement holds together. The trouble is that contracts do not stay still. A bank upgrades its systems, adds a field, renames another, and sharpens a definition that used to be loose. And the instant it does, every company that was reading the old shape is exposed — not usually to a dramatic crash, which would at least announce itself, but to the quieter disaster in which the data still arrives, is still accepted, and is silently misread. A lender scores an application on a number that no longer means what it meant last week, and no alarm goes off anywhere.
Guarding against that is a discipline called versioning, and it amounts to refusing to make the past disappear the moment the future ships. A provider publishes the new shape of its data while keeping the old one working through a stated grace period, so that the companies depending on it can move across on purpose rather than in a scramble. In an ordinary piece of software, this is simply good manners. In a scheme that the state has mandated, in which hundreds of participants will join at roughly the same moment, and that is legally obliged to keep customer-facing services running while it changes underneath them, it stops being manners and becomes structural. A version change handled carelessly does not trouble one team; it travels through every service that trusted the old contract. And because open banking defines a permission partly in terms of the data it covers, the two problems are not really separate. Reshape the data and you can quietly reshape the consent — widening or narrowing what a customer actually agreed to share, without anyone deciding to.
Put those two problems side by side and the pattern of the delayed launch reads differently. The framework, finished and public, was never the achievement. The achievement — the thing that keeps slipping, because it is genuinely hard — is making the rules true across dozens of independent systems, under real traffic, with real money and real data in motion, in a way ordinary customers never have to think about. A regulator that ships carelessly to be first would not save a headline; it would spend the only currency open banking cannot be rebuilt without: the public’s belief that when they say no, the machinery listens.
For now, the people who will decide whether Nigeria’s version works are not the ones who wrote the guidelines. They are the ones arguing, well out of public view, over how many seconds a credential should live and how long an old data format deserves to survive after a new one appears – small, unglamorous questions on which a whole country’s trust in a new idea quietly rests.
Al-amin Ajao Olayiwola is a Senior Software Engineer