The Central Bank of Nigeria, in exercising its mandate to ensure the stability of the financial system and pursuant to its role in deepening the financial system, developed a regulatory framework on open banking to increase the Application Programming Interface (API) based integrations in Nigerian financial industry. The guidelines entitled Regulatory Framework for Open Banking in Nigeria is “designed to foster the sharing and leveraging of customer-permissioned data bybanks with third party firms to build solutions and services that provide efficiency,greater financial transparency and options for account holders and to enhance access to financial services in Nigeria”.
The guideline covers Payments and remittance services, Collection and Disbursement services, Deposit-taking, Credit, Personal finance advisory and management, Treasury Management, Credit ratings/scoring, Mortgage, Leasing/Hire purchase and Other services as may be determined by the Bank
The objectives of this framework were listed as follows:
i. To provide an enabling regulatory environment for provision of innovative and customer-eccentric financial services through the safe utilization and exchange data and services;
ii. To define risk based data access levels and service categorizations towards effective management of risk in the operation of open API;
iii. To outline baseline requirements and standards for the exchange of data and services among participants in the financial services sector;
iv. To provide risk management guidance for operators in the financial services space for leveraging data and APIs in the provision of financial services;
v. To promote competition in banking and other financial services and enhance access to financial services.
Open exchange of data and services through APIs shall be according to the following data and services categories:Product Information and Service Touchpoints (PIST), Market Insight Transactions (MIT), Personal Information and Financial Transaction (PIFT) and Profile, Analytics and Scoring Transaction (PAST).
The guideline made provisions for Data and Service Access Governance, Guiding Principles for API Specifications, Roles and Responsibilities of Participants, Responsibilities of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Risk Management and Customer Rights, Responsibilities and Redress Mechanism.