The Central Bank of Nigeria published its CBN Fintech Report, “Shaping the Future of Fintech in Nigeria: Innovation, Inclusion and Integrity”, drawing on a nationwide fintech survey plus a June 2025 closed-door stakeholder workshop and an October 2025 CBN Fintech Roundtable. The report maps perceived regulatory and infrastructure bottlenecks and sets out policy pathways intended to streamline fintech supervision, strengthen digital public infrastructure for inclusion, and reinforce financial integrity and reputation, including through more structured regulator–industry engagement. Supporting analysis highlights the scale of Nigeria’s instant payments rails, with close to 11 billion transactions processed in 2024 via the NIBSS NIP platform, up from 5 billion in 2022, and more than 25% of electronic transactions processed through real-time payment channels. Survey findings point to compliance and time-to-market as key constraints, with 87.5% of respondents saying compliance costs significantly affect innovation capacity, 62.5% citing delays in approvals and ambiguity in guidelines as top challenges, and 37.5% reporting product launches take more than 12 months due to compliance bottlenecks. Proposed policy options include a standing CBN–fintech engagement forum, a Single Regulatory Window and digital licensing gateway, expansion of the regulatory sandbox (including AI use cases), shared compliance utilities such as Compliance-as-a-Service, stronger fraud intelligence-sharing, accelerated implementation of open banking, improved API-based access to digital identity verification, and pilots for regional regulatory passporting to support cross-border expansion. An annex sets out sequenced action points over three phases, starting with establishing the fintech engagement forum, issuing an open banking implementation roadmap, scoping a Single Regulatory Window, and coordinating a cross-agency review of Payment Service Bank lending restrictions and digital ID access. Near-term actions include a “Regulatory Sandbox 2.0” pilot cohort, operationalising a fintech credit guarantee window with development finance institutions, issuing guidance on data portability and consumer protection under open finance, and initiating bilateral consultations on regulatory passporting. Later steps include formalising a fintech advisory council, launching a regulatory engagement platform with a public calendar, embedding SupTech pilots, and participation in ECOWAS and African Union alignment fora.

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