The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Nigeria has said that the safety of investors and their investments in the capital market is one of its cardinal objectives in rolling out its Regulatory Incubation Programme for Fintechs.
The commission’s Director, Registration, Exchanges, Market Infrastructure and Innovation, Mr. Abdulkadir Abbas, who made this remark in Abuja, explained that the programme was designed as an interim measure to facilitate genuine regulation of Fintechs’ activities in order to align them with the capital market standards.
He explained: “It is just for testing, it will not be approved at that stage but all Fintech ideas that conform to investment activities are defined in Investment and Securities Act 2007 can be tested under that kind of programme. As we informed the market, there is going to be an initial assessment before it can be on-boarded into the regulatory incubation programme.
The investment expert noted that the take-off of the programme had been very encouraging based on the rising number of market participants, who were showing more interest and had commenced the first stage which is the initial fintech assessment route.
Abbas recalled that prior to the commencement of the RI, the SEC had discussions with various fintech applicants some of whom are existing capital market operators.
He clarified: “Some are existing market operators; some are actually new interests into the market so we have been having this kind of engagement. And from the time when we announced the takeoff till today, what has been happening is that a lot of applicants are actually accessing what we call the initial assessment form so there is a need which we can now be able to provide the initial information and that is the first stage of on boarding you into the RI, that is where we are now.
“And we have had a couple of engagements and what interests us really is the traction of new fintech companies providing a solution to an existing problem in the market. But what we are trying to do now very quickly is to encourage more of these fintechs to come now that we have opened this phase.
“We believe that it will really deepen the market and it will facilitate bringing new products into the market and new ideas will come on board towards finding solutions to existing problems in the market. As I said earlier, the principal plan is to actually provide an avenue of new solutions without compromising on investor protection which is our own key objective”, Abbas added.
