ABA Editorial · Feb 6, 2026 · 13 min read
In August 2025 Nigeria became the first African country to go live with a formal open banking framework. Two months earlier, in May 2025, Nigerian open banking pioneer Okra quietly shut down after running out of runway. Mono and Stitch remain the surviving API infrastructure operators. Inside the regulatory timeline, the economics that killed Okra, and what the CBN framework actually enables.
The year 2025 was simultaneously the year African open banking finally became real and the year its most prominent pioneer collapsed. On 1 August 2025, Nigeria went live with its formal open banking framework, making it the first African country to implement open banking at full regulatory scale. Less than three months earlier, in May 2025, Okra (the Nigerian open banking startup that had raised USD 16 million and been called "the super connector for open banking on the continent") quietly shut down without a press release, pivot announcement, or acquisition, when its API services simply stopped responding. These two events are the opposite sides of the same story: open banking is a genuinely important infrastructure category, but the commercial path to building it is far harder than the 2021-era venture thesis assumed. This is a market report on where African open banking stands in 2026 and what the sector learned.
Nigeria's open banking journey began in 2017 with the creation of Open Banking Nigeria (OBN), an industry-led body founded by industry veterans and spearheaded by Adedeji Olowe. OBN's role was to drive API standards and advocate for a regulatory framework that would require banks to share customer financial data with authorized third parties under customer consent. In 2021, the Central Bank of Nigeria issued an Open Banking Regulatory Framework. In 2023, the CBN issued Operational Guidelines. In April 2025, the CBN approved implementation of open banking with a formal go-live date of 1 August 2025. Nigeria became the first African country to implement formal open banking at scale.
The mechanics of the Nigerian framework are consistent with open banking frameworks in other regions. Customers can give consent for licensed fintechs, banks, and other regulated participants to access their account balances, transaction history, and (in some cases) initiate payments on their behalf. Data access happens through a shared, standardized API available across all Nigerian banks. Access is limited to CBN-licensed and supervised entities. Consent management is tied to the Bank Verification Number (BVN), which serves as the unique customer identifier across the Nigerian banking system. NIBSS-backed systems handle the consent registry and API registration at the core.
The early API provider banks include Sterling Bank, Sparkle, Wema Bank, and FCMB (which had joined Open Banking Nigeria as early as 2020). Among the fintechs positioned to benefit are Mono, OnePipe, Lendsqr, and MoniMoore. Neobanks like Kuda and PalmPay (the latter reportedly past 35 million users) leverage the framework both as API consumers and API providers. The framework also anticipates expansion into "open finance" covering credit, insurance, investments, and virtual accounts, which is the broader integration layer that genuine open banking eventually enables.
Okra was founded in 2020 by software engineer Fara Ashiru Jituboh and entrepreneur David Peterside. By mid-2021 the company had raised approximately USD 16 million from backers including TLcom Capital, Susa Ventures, and Accenture Ventures. Jituboh was profiled by Forbes as the "queen of APIs." The pitch was to build "the digital plumbing for Africa's emerging financial ecosystem" by offering developers secure API tools to access real-time financial data. In mid-2025, Okra's API service disappeared without warning. According to Techlabari reporting, the shutdown happened in May 2025, before the CBN's open banking go-live date.
Multiple post-mortems identified a consistent set of causes. Regulatory lag: Okra's business model depended on enforceable rules requiring banks to share customer data in a standardized way. Nigeria's open banking framework remained stuck in draft form until 2023 and did not fully go live until August 2025. For four years, Okra was trying to sell a product whose regulatory foundation did not exist, which meant every bank integration was a bespoke negotiation rather than a standardized API call. Currency pain: Okra's infrastructure costs were dollar-denominated (AWS cloud services, developer tools). Between 2023 and 2024 the naira lost more than half its value against the dollar, which ballooned Okra's operating costs in local currency terms without a corresponding increase in revenue. Crowded field: Better-funded rivals Mono (approximately USD 17.6 million raised) and Stitch (approximately USD 52 million raised for its broader open banking and payments platform) outspent Okra on distribution and product development. Pivot fatigue: Okra attempted to pivot into adjacent infrastructure categories (Nebula, a cloud product) but never secured the capital needed to compete with AWS or local cloud rivals. Runway pressure: By 2025, Okra had been burning cash for years waiting for the market to mature, and the runway simply ended before the market did.
Jituboh, once celebrated as a leading African fintech founder, moved on to lead engineering at a UK startup called Kerne. Okra's shutdown left clients, investors, and partners with no clear data handover plan, which in more mature open banking markets would have triggered regulatory intervention but in Nigeria's emerging framework simply highlighted the gap between ambition and enforcement.
Mono, founded in 2020 with a focus on helping businesses access bank account data with user consent, has become the leading Nigerian open banking infrastructure provider. Within its first year of operation, Mono was processing 5 million data sets per hour according to company disclosures. In April 2024, Mono announced a partnership with Mastercard to introduce account-to-account (A2A) payments and a suite of open banking products powered by Mastercard Gateway. Mono's model combines direct bank data access with payment initiation, giving fintech customers a single integration layer for both read and write operations against the Nigerian banking system.
Mono positioned itself differently from Okra. Where Okra tried to be a horizontal infrastructure layer serving any fintech, Mono built narrower but deeper integrations with specific banks and specific customer segments. Mono's partnership approach with Mastercard also gave it a global co-investor and co-seller that Okra never achieved. And critically, Mono was more capital-efficient during the 2022-2024 fintech funding winter, which meant its runway stretched to the point where the Nigerian open banking framework went live.
Stitch, covered in more detail in the South African fintech report, is the cross-border alternative to the Nigerian open banking stack. Founded in 2019 in Cape Town by Kiaan Pillay, Natalie Cuthbert, and Priyen Pillay, Stitch raised a USD 55 million Series B in April 2025 and built a unified API platform that enables businesses to accept payments across multiple methods (Pay by Bank, card, digital wallets, manual transfers, debit orders, cryptocurrency) and to run payouts, recurring collections, and fraud prevention from the same platform.
An important distinction: some observers have argued that Stitch is not strictly "open banking" in the European Payment Services Directive sense, because it relies on bespoke bank integrations rather than standardized APIs. Stitch does acquisition and integration across many African banks and treats open banking as a functional outcome rather than a regulatory category. In practice, this distinction matters less to Stitch's customers than to regulators, and the company's 2025 Series B and its acquisitions of ExiPay and Efficacy Payments show the model working commercially. Stitch also has a DCSP license from SARB, which lets it issue cards and process transactions directly.
Kenya's Central Bank included open infrastructure as a priority in its 2021-2025 strategy, but Kenya has not yet implemented a formal open banking framework. Instead, Kenyan open banking exists informally through Safaricom's Daraja API (which opens M-Pesa data to authorized third parties) and through Co-operative Bank's open APIs. South Africa has several large banks experimenting with open banking APIs, but no national regulatory framework. Egypt's Central Bank has been moving in the open banking direction but has not set a formal go-live date. The result is a continent where Nigeria is ahead of peers on formal frameworks, while Kenya and South Africa have better commercial infrastructure in the absence of a framework.
Three things. First, whether the Nigerian August 2025 open banking framework actually generates the expected API usage volumes, or whether banks drag their feet on implementation and the framework exists on paper more than in practice. Second, whether Mono and Stitch continue to scale without the kind of capital pressure that killed Okra, or whether the sector needs a third round of consolidation. Third, whether other African regulators (Kenya, South Africa, Egypt) follow Nigeria's lead on formal frameworks, which would create the cross-border regulatory environment needed for pan-African open banking services.
The lesson of Okra is that open banking is infrastructure, not a product. Building infrastructure requires either regulatory mandate, massive scale, or deep-pocketed patient capital. Okra had none of the three. Mono and Stitch have enough of each to have survived. Whoever is building the next generation of open banking infrastructure in Africa should study both sides of the Okra story very carefully.
This report draws on TheCable, The Nation Newspaper, and Premium Times Nigeria reporting on the Okra collapse (July 2025); Techlabari coverage of Okra's May 2025 shutdown; LuxHub analysis of Nigeria's open banking framework and August 2025 go-live (July 2025); Vanguard News reporting on Nigerian open banking startups and 2025 outlook (January 2025); Notadeepdive coverage of the CBN open banking approval (April 2025); Open Banking Nigeria analysis of Mono and Stitch business models; and public materials from Open Banking Nigeria, the Central Bank of Nigeria, and NIBSS.