Oversight and supervision in open finance: Considerations for African regulators
Oversight and supervision in open finance: Considerations for African regulators
10 September, 2026 •Many financial regulators are considering how open finance could be effectively supervised in their jurisdiction. For millions of people across the Global South, the proof of their financial reliability exists scattered across mobile wallets, savings groups, and informal ledgers. Connecting this data via open finance can help providers design financial products and services for the unbanked and underbanked.
Yet, developing an open finance framework is only part of the task. Regulators also need to consider how the ecosystem will be overseen, including:
- How emerging risks will be identified
- How consumers will be protected
- How successful outcomes will be measured
Regulators in Africa must plan for supervision from the start, shape design choices, calibrate tools to local contexts and gradually expand scope and depth of supervisory analyses and coverage of participants.
Against this backdrop, Cenfri has developed the Oversight and supervision in open finance: Considerations for African regulators to assist regulators navigate these considerations.
The report draws on global practices and on broader supervisory principles and practices in digital financial services and adapts them to the realities of Africa’s emerging open finance ecosystems. It also builds on Cenfri’s work on designing context-appropriate approaches to open finance.
Our guidance does not propose a single model for open finance supervision. Instead, it identifies three key dimensions of open finance supervision: operational oversight, conduct supervision, and policy outcomes and market development monitoring. It also considers how regulatory structures, supervisory posture, capacity and legal powers shape what regulators can do in practice.
These elements form the foundation for the phase-specific supervisory considerations set out in the report, which outlines how supervision should evolve as open finance ecosystems mature.
This work was made possible with the financial support of the “Data Governance in Africa” Team Europe Action, co-funded by the European Commission, Belgium, Estonia, Finland, France and Germany, in collaboration with the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH.
Download the full report to assess which considerations are most relevant to your context.
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