AropetJ/uganda-open-finance-standard

Open API specification for financial interoperability in Uganda. Covers account information, payment initiation, and USSD consent flows for feature phone users. # Uganda Open Finance Standard (UOFS) > **A proposed open API standard for Uganda's financial system — > enabling true interoperability between banks, mobile money operators, > fintechs, SACCOs, and microfinance institutions.** --- ## The Problem Uganda's financial system processes over **UGX 326 trillion in electronic transactions annually** and has **34.6 million active mobile money subscribers** — more than the entire formal banking sector combined. By any measure, digital finance in Uganda is not a future aspiration. It is already the present reality for most Ugandans. Yet underneath this activity, the infrastructure is fundamentally broken in one specific way: **none of it talks to each other through open standards.** MTN Mobile Money — which alone handles 40% of Uganda's e-money transactions — operates a proprietary system. Airtel Money operates a separate proprietary system. Every commercial bank runs its own integration layer. SACCOs, microfinance institutions, and fintechs must negotiate individual, bilateral agreements with each provider to connect to any of them. There is no common language. There is no open rail. There is no standard. The consequences of this are direct and measurable: **For users:** Your financial identity, transaction history, and creditworthiness are locked inside whichever institution holds your account. You cannot take that data anywhere else. You cannot use it to access credit from a different lender, prove your income to a landlord, or authorise a fintech to act on your behalf — not without that fintech building a separate, expensive, proprietary integration with each institution. **For fintechs:** Building a product that works across MTN, Airtel, Centenary Bank, and Stanbic requires four separate integrations, four separate commercial agreements, four separate compliance reviews, and four separate technical maintenance burdens — for what is functionally the same operation. The cost of this fragmentation is paid in innova …