Speaking at a virtual working meeting of the Alliance for Financial Inclusion (AFI), Dr Addison said a lot of the digitisation and formalisation measures implemented by the government has shored up financial inclusion in Ghana.
“The implementation of several policy measures geared toward banking the ‘unbanked’ and formalising the informal financial sector, constitutes integral parts of the overall strategy to promote an inclusive financial system in the country.
“Starting off, the bank facilitated the passage of the Payment Systems and Services Act, 2019 (Act 987) and set up a Payment Systems Strategy (2019-2024) to provide the enabling legal and regulatory environment for the orderly development of the payment ecosystem. These connect seamlessly with the country’s National Financial Inclusion Development Strategy (NFIDS) framework,” he said.
“Indeed, these policies have yielded some encouraging results with increased registered mobile money accounts to over 38 million in 2020. Volume of Instant Pay also increased four folds in 2020. With high penetration of mobile money and increased digital payments, Ghana is well-positioned to become a financially-included society in the medium-term”, he said.
Meanwhile, the value of mobile money transactions has also more than doubled in the last twelve months, according to the Bank of Ghana.
The total value shot up by over 120 percent from February 2020 to February 2021. On a monthly basis, the value of transactions from January to February saw a minimal increase of about 1 percent.
This was contained in the Central Bank’s Summary of Macroeconomic and Financial Data report.