This paper reviews the Banking and Other Financial Institutions Act (BOFIA) 2020 in Nigeria in the light of regulatory theories and extant empirical evidences, with a view to predicting its potential effects on financial system stability in Nigeria, domestic stakeholders and international investors. Our review shows that the new law attains a higher level of clarity in presentation of banking rules and regulations, tightens the incentive structures for compliance, widens regulatory breadth of financial sector coverage, penalises banks’ office holders more severely for regulatory breaches, emphasises banks’ compliance with prudential ratios, and improves banks’ disclosure. Empirical evidence in the literature that suggests these improvements may enhance financial system stability is corroborated by analytical statistics of banking sector data over 1983–2020 period. Our findings show that financial and prudential performance of Nigerian banks significantly improved after regulatory reforms of 2004 and 2009, suggesting that their codification in BOFIA 2020 has a strong potential to enhance financial system stability in Nigeria to the benefits of all stakeholders. These merits may, however, be undermined by inherent pitfalls in the Act such as reduction in the roles of other financial safety-net participants, negative market signals of such reduction, weak harmonisation with other Acts governing relevant banking issues, and concentration of supervisory power in a single regulatory authority with its inclination for regulatory capture, among others.

本文根据监管理论和现有经验证据回顾了尼日利亚的《2020 年银行和其他金融机构法》（BOFIA），以期预测其对尼日利亚、国内利益相关者和国际投资者金融体系稳定的潜在影响。我们的审查表明，新法在银行规则和法规的表述方面达到了更高的清晰度，收紧了合规的激励结构，扩大了金融部门的监管范围，对银行职员的违规行为进行了更严厉的处罚，强调了银行的遵守审慎比率，并改善银行的披露。文献中的经验证据表明，这些改进可能会增强金融体系的稳定性，这一点得到了 1983-2020 年银行业数据分析统计的证实。我们的研究结果表明，尼日利亚银行的财务和审慎表现在 2004 年和 2009 年的监管改革后显着改善，这表明它们在 BOFIA 2020 中的编纂具有强大的潜力，可以增强尼日利亚金融体系的稳定性，造福所有利益相关者。然而，这些优点可能会被该法案中的固有缺陷所破坏，例如减少其他金融安全网参与者的作用、这种减少的负面市场信号、与其他管理相关银行问题的法案的协调性薄弱、