The Nigerian Fintech Commission Bill: Reform or Regulatory Redundancy?
Mide Alabi5 min read·Just now--
A couple of days ago, the House of Representatives converged for a public hearing on a bill seeking to establish a Nigerian Fintech Regulatory Commission (NFRC).
The bill, sponsored by Hon. Fuad Kayode Laguda, aims to create an independent body to govern all fintechs nationwide, tasked with providing licenses, issuing directives/regulations, and prescribing tariffs and fees to replace what has been described as a fragmented system.
It seems to be an attempt to amalgamate various laws from multiple agencies into one to save fintechs valuable time and funds.
On the surface, it doesn’t sound like a bad idea. Today, a Nigerian fintech company interacts, directly or indirectly, with the Central Bank of Nigeria, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Nigeria Data Protection Commission, the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission, the Nigerian Communications Commission, and often the Federal Inland Revenue Service. The system is layered, sometimes frustrating, but it is not empty.
The Nigerian Fintech Regulatory Commission Bill 2025 proposes to introduce yet another regulator into that ecosystem.
The stated objective is coordination and sector-specific oversight. The structural question is whether the bill achieves coordination or institutionalizes duplication.
The Architecture of Overlap
Section 3 of the Bill establishes the Nigerian Fintech Regulatory Commission with authority to license, regulate, supervise, and enforce compliance across all fintech services, facilities, and equipment
On its face, that appears comprehensive, but in practice, it cuts directly across mandates that already exist.
The Central Bank of Nigeria retains exclusive jurisdiction over banks and other financial institutions under BOFIA 2020. The SEC supervises investment and digital asset activities, while the FCCPC regulates competition and consumer protection. The NDPC governs data protection compliance, and the NCC controls telecommunications infrastructure and interconnection standards.
None of these enabling statutes are expressly amended by the Bill.
This creates a familiar problem in administrative law: concurrent jurisdiction without a hierarchy clause. Where two regulators possess overlapping statutory authority, the burden does not fall on the regulators. Rather, it falls on the operators—who it seems could be in for a tougher time.
Dual Licensing and Legal Inconsistency
Section 31 of the Bill requires all fintech operators to obtain a license from the proposed Commission, even where they already hold licenses from the CBN or SEC
That requirement introduces dual compliance audits, dual reporting obligations, potentially divergent prudential standards, and additional licensing fees.
More importantly, it risks contradiction.
BOFIA 2020 confers exclusive licensing authority on the CBN over banks and certain financial institutions. If a fintech subsidiary of a licensed bank must also obtain approval from a separate fintech regulator, the question becomes structural: which body has supervisory primacy? If the two issue inconsistent directives, which prevails?
The bill does not resolve this, and it seems that this debacle has been consigned to be a future subject of litigation to be resolved by a superior court.
Competition and Constitutional Friction
Section 90 of the Bill grants the proposed Commission exclusive authority over fintech-related competition matters
The Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Act 2018 already vests broad jurisdiction in the FCCPC over competition and consumer protection across all sectors of the economy. That act contains protective clauses designed to prevent erosion of its jurisdiction.
Creating a parallel competition authority within a sector-specific regulator, without amending the FCCPA, raises constitutional and statutory consistency concerns. At minimum, it risks forum shopping and inconsistent enforcement, and at worst, it produces litigation over jurisdiction before substantive issues are even reached.
In a sector where speed and regulatory certainty affect capital inflows, jurisdictional ambiguity can be an incredibly dangerous feature.
Three Layers of Oversight
The bill does not stop at creating a commission. It also establishes a National Fintech Management Council chaired by the Minister of Finance, with membership drawn from existing regulators
The structure therefore contains:
- Ministerial policy control
- A coordinating council populated by existing regulators
- A new operational regulator
This is presented as harmonization, but structurally, it resembles vertical stacking.
If the same regulators remain active within the Council and their original statutory mandates remain intact, then the new Commission does not eliminate overlap as much as it formalizes it.
Accountability in multilayer systems often diffuses rather than concentrates. When every regulator is present at the table, responsibility becomes shared, and shared responsibility can dilute decisiveness.
Regulatory Certainty and Investment Signals
The Bill empowers the proposed Commission to modify license conditions, prohibit assignments without approval, suspend or revoke licenses on broadly framed grounds, including public interest
Discretion is a necessary regulatory tool, agreed, but indeterminate discretion across multiple regulators is an investment risk.
Fintechs are often involved in all of payments, credit, digital infrastructure, data processing, and securities. The distinction between banking and fintech has already narrowed. Many banks operate fintech subsidiaries, and as many fintechs perform functions traditionally associated with “legacy” banks.
In such an environment, clarity of supervisory boundaries is capital.
A structure that introduces dual authority without a repeal-and-replace mechanism for overlapping statutes may increase regulatory transaction costs without delivering additional prudential stability.
Is a New Regulator Necessary?
The million-dollar question here is whether Nigeria’s current framework lacks oversight or lacks coordination.
If coordination is the concern, alternatives exist, such as:
- Amending the BOFIA, FCCPA, ISA, NDPA, NITDA Act, and NCC Act to delineate primacy.
- Strengthening fintech-specific supervisory capacity within the CBN or a lead regulator instead of creating an entirely new act.
Without structural amendments to existing laws, adding a new commission risks creating regulatory concurrency rather than coherence.
The Ease of Doing Business Dimension
At a time when jurisdictions compete to attract fintech capital through sandbox regimes, clarity in digital asset classification, and predictable supervisory pathways, the introduction of additional bureaucratic layers sends a signal.
That signal is cautionary but risks being seen as anti-innovation. Investors price regulatory risk, and when this authority is fragmented and licensing requirements multiply, they are more than likely to pursue investment in another jurisdiction with (what is perceived to be) less regulatory risk.
Nigeria’s fintech sector has grown under scrutiny from multiple regulators. The question policymakers must answer is whether growth is best served by consolidation or multiplication.
Conclusion
The Nigerian Fintech Regulatory Commission Bill 2025 appears motivated by a desire to create order in a rapidly evolving sector. Its structural design, however, raises questions about overlap, jurisdictional conflict, compliance layering, and constitutional friction.
Unless accompanied by sweeping amendments to existing enabling statutes, the Bill may not simplify regulation. Rather, it could add a new layer of complexity.
In regulatory design, more architecture does not always produce more clarity or achieve the desired results.
Thankfully, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Hon. Tajudeen Abbas, clarified after the hearing that the public hearing was convened to obtain input from regulators, industry operators, investors, and consumer advocacy groups to properly define the scope, authority, and limitations of the proposed body and stressed the importance of avoiding regulatory conflict with existing statutory bodies.
As much as we hope that progress will be made in this regard, it is evident that the fintech sector requires coordination, certainty, and calibrated oversight. Whether this bill in its current iteration delivers those objectives remains open to serious debate.
