CBN’s OTC FX Futures Fee Expense Crashes 91.5% as NDF Market Goes Quiet

Among the dozens of line items packed into Notes accompanying the Central Bank of Nigeria’s (CBN) 2025 annual report, one number stands out for the size of its collapse.

The “OTC FX futures transaction fee expense” — what CBN pays for trading and clearing activity on the naira-settled OTC FX futures market — fell to ₦1.08 billion in 2025 from ₦12.69 billion in 2024, a drop of ₦11.61 billion, or 91.5%.

The crash tells the story of a policy shift that has been unfolding since late 2023: CBN’s retreat from actively quoting and settling naira non-deliverable forwards (NDFs) — the OTC FX futures contracts it has sold since 2016 on the FMDQ OTC Securities Exchange platform to help importers, foreign investors and corporates hedge naira depreciation risk.

Why the Fee Fell: CBN Stopped Feeding the Market It Helped Build

The CBN halted the quotation of offer rates for all Cleared Naira-Settled Non-Deliverable Forwards contracts on September 26, 2023, as part of Governor Olayemi Cardoso’s push toward a market-determined exchange rate.

Since then, the market has essentially gone dormant:

• No new far-month (60-month) contracts have been introduced since August 2024, a trend that continued through at least July 2025.

• There were zero trades recorded on Cleared USD/NGN NDF contracts across all of Q1–Q4 2024 and into Q1–April 2025.

• The cumulative notional value of open Cleared NDF contracts stood at just $0.002 billion as of July 2025 — a year-on-year decline of 98.81%, data from the FMDQ shows.

• By December 29, 2025, total open contract value across the entire NDF curve had shrunk to a mere $1.55 million.

With no new quotes and no trades, the trading, clearing and platform fees CBN owes on this activity, were bound to shrink toward zero.

The ₦1.08 billion CBN still paid in 2025 looks like residual clearing and administration charges on the legacy book of contracts still winding down, rather than fees on fresh activity.

FMDQ’s Recurring Revenue Line Runs Dry

CBN has been the anchor seller of naira OTC FX futures since the product launched in 2016, offering a new monthly contract to replace each one maturing so that up to twelve open contracts existed at any time, later extended to tenors of up to five years.

All of that activity was quoted, traded and cleared on the FMDQ platform — FMDQ Exchange for trading, FMDQ Clear as central counterparty — with fees flowing to FMDQ under its published fees and dues framework.

MoneyCentral reported exclusively earlier that about 67 percent of the total revenues of N31 billion earned by FMDQ Group in 2020, were fees paid to the exchange by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN).

MoneyCentral’s analysis of FMDQ’s financial statement then showed that FMDQ was benefitting from its monopoly as the major platform where the CBN’s FX futures contracts were traded.

FMDQ earned a total of N20.819 billion in fees (futures management and margin management) charged to the CBN in 2020 (that MoneyCentral could verify), which was up 86 percent from N11.17 billion CBN fees earned in 2019.

That matters because FX derivatives were once framed as a flagship product for FMDQ’s market infrastructure ambitions.

But the exchange’s own recent numbers suggest it has largely absorbed the hit by leaning on a different part of the FX book. FMDQ Group’s FY2024 results showed total revenue up 49.9% to ₦51.41 billion and profit before tax up 65.5% to ₦23.23 billion, with the FX segment contributing 45% of total market turnover — but the growth engine there was Spot FX, which surged 283% year-on-year, .

Analysis of FMDQ Exchange’s revenue estimates net transaction fees at ₦5.72 billion for 2024, up 39% — a figure that appears to be riding the spot-market boom that followed Nigeria’s 2023–2024 FX unification, rather than the NDF book that CBN has left to run down.

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