Former Diamond Bank CEO Uzoma Dozie has said Nigeria’s planned open banking framework could transform access to credit, deepen financial inclusion and increase competition across the financial sector by giving customers control over their banking data,.
Speaking on Global Business Report on Arise News, Dozie who is the founder and CEO of Sparkle, a financial technology community described open banking as a shift that “puts the power back into the hands of the customers,” allowing individuals to securely share their financial data with institutions of their choice rather than leaving it locked within a single bank.
“Today, for example, you’re banking a particular bank, and you’ve been banking it for 20 years. All that information is locked there,” Dozie said. “Open banking now puts the power back in the customer, so on his phone he can give his other bank permission to actually send his information in a very secure, open and standard way.”
He argued that customer-controlled data sharing would eliminate cumbersome processes such as manually providing bank statements when seeking loans and would enable financial institutions to make quicker, better-informed lending decisions.
Dozie said the biggest commercial impact could be in lending, where fintech firms and digital banks would gain the ability to analyse customers’ complete financial histories with permission rather than relying on fragmented information. At the heart of the system are application programming interfaces (APIs), the technology that enables software systems to communicate securely.
“And then when you now put AI on top of it, it means I can glean 20 years of data in a fraction of a second, The API is just a standard that says this is how we’re going to engage, Today there are APIs with banks, but the APIs are not standard.” He said.
He likened the move toward standardized APIs to the adoption of USB-C charging ports, allowing different financial institutions to exchange information seamlessly while maintaining common technical standards.
Cybersecurity Concerns
Addressing concerns about privacy and cybersecurity, Dozie said customer consent remains central to the framework stating “It is only the customer that can give permission to move his data,”
He argued that the current practice of emailing bank statements is less secure than standardized data sharing because customers often have little visibility into who ultimately accesses their financial records.
Dozie however praised the Central Bank of Nigeria for establishing one of Africa’s most advanced regulatory frameworks for open banking, noting that the country was among the first on the continent to develop technical standards and a regulatory registry for participants. He noted that implementation had slipped beyond the original 2025 target and now forms part of the CBN’s broader payment system vision extending to 2028.
While acknowledging the delay, he suggested caution may be preferable for infrastructure that depends heavily on public confidence.
“You can argue that sometimes it’s better to delay and deploy perfectly, especially when you are coming up with a new payment way that requires trust and confidence in the system.”
He argued that wider access to customer-authorised financial data would lower lending risks, reduce borrowing costs and unlock new opportunities for businesses and consumers across Nigeria.
“The more information I have, the lower the risk, the lower the cost of lending, the more that you can do,” Dozie concluded.
