Leveraging Financial Technology: A Comparative Analysis of the Legal Readiness of Nigeria for Fintech Disruption Vis-A-Vis Other Jurisdictions

The world thrives on continuous technological innovations in diverse areas, from health to agriculture, education, information, and even finance, amongst others. The essence of these innovations is to create ease, automating and simplifying operations to achieve greater results. This is descriptive of the concept of ‘Financial Technology’ (FinTech) which revolutionises the financial sector and creates a relatively easy alternative to traditional financial services. FinTech addresses constraints in traditional financial products, especially access and equality and even threatens to phase-out those products. Despite the ease associated with FinTech products, the risk and disadvantages are also numerous. FinTech products, especially cryptocurrency, gives-off the notion of anonymity and invincibility, that is, the confidence that the participants are off-the-reach of financial sector regulators. This notion has given rise to risky and criminal utilisation of FinTech products. For Nigeria, which is at the teething stage of financial regulation, the adoption of FinTech poses serious challenges. This is evident in the regulatory indecisiveness of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) as to how to treat FinTech. This research project aims at charting a map for Nigerian regulators on how to capture and control the FinTech sector. The research introduces Fin-Tech and the component products. It further examines the regulatory attitude in other jurisdictions towards FinTech and assesses the suitability of their attitude. The research discusses the regulatory response of Nigerian regulators and compares same with that of other jurisdictions in order to arrive at a relatively acceptable response.