- BoG Governor Sets Four Priorities for Africa’s Digital-Payments Future as Ghana Crosses One Billion Transactions
Bank of Ghana Governor Dr Johnson Pandit Asiama has outlined a four-part agenda for the future of digital payments in Sub-Saharan Africa, calling for cheaper cross-border transfers, stronger financial health, greater consumer trust and less fragmented fintech regulation.
His intervention positions Ghana as an increasingly important testing ground for the next phase of African financial technology, moving beyond domestic mobile-money adoption towards interoperable regional payments, supervised digital credit, open banking and shared regulatory standards.
Speaking at the Joint AFR-MCM High-Level Event on Digital Innovations in Payments at the ongoing World Bank/ IMF Annual Meetings happening in Bangkok, Thailand, Dr Asiama said the debate was no longer about whether Africans would adopt digital payments. Transaction growth had already settled that question. The policy challenge was ensuring scale translated into efficiency, inclusion and stability.
Ghana’s mobile-money market illustrates both the progress and the responsibility created by that scale. Mobile-money transactions exceeded one billion in a single month for the first time in August 2026, reaching GH¢519 billion in value. The value was 46.5 percent higher than a year earlier.
Those figures reflect an extraordinary shift in how households and businesses transfer money, pay bills and conduct commerce. They also mean that disruption, fraud or poorly designed regulation can affect millions of users and large portions of economic activity almost immediately.
“The question before us now is how to ensure that this scale delivers efficiency, inclusion and stability across the region,” Dr Asiama told fellow central bank governors and representatives of the International Monetary Fund.
The event brought together governors from across Sub-Saharan Africa to exchange national experiences and help shape the IMF’s future work on central bank digital currencies and digital payments. It was also intended to identify policy priorities and areas in which countries require technical assistance.
Dr Asiama’s first priority was turning domestic payment progress into efficient regional infrastructure. Although mobile wallets have transformed national markets, many transfers between African countries continue to pass through correspondent banks outside the continent.
That routing adds time, foreign-exchange conversion and intermediary charges to transactions that should support regional commerce. According to the Governor, the cost remains above 8 percent, compared with an international target of 3 percent.
For small businesses, traders and families, the difference is not abstract. High transfer costs reduce the value received by beneficiaries, discourage formal transactions and weaken the commercial promise of the African Continental Free Trade Area.
Ghana is testing cross-border interoperability through the Ghana–Rwanda and Ghana–Nigeria corridors, using central bank digital currencies, stablecoins, bank accounts and mobile wallets. The Bank has also extended the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System to mobile wallets in the Ghana–Nigeria corridor.
The objective is to move beyond controlled pilots and launch services that ordinary consumers and businesses can use. Importantly, Dr Asiama argued that countries should build on PAPSS and other existing infrastructure instead of creating another generation of disconnected platforms.
That approach reflects an emerging policy realism. Africa does not necessarily suffer from a shortage of payment initiatives; it suffers from systems that cannot always communicate, regulatory approvals that stop at national borders and limited commercial adoption beyond pilot phases.
Ghana’s willingness to test several forms of money also suggests that the Bank is avoiding an exclusive bet on one technology. CBDCs, stablecoins, commercial-bank deposits and mobile money may coexist, provided the systems linking them remain secure and properly regulated.
The second priority is moving from financial access to financial health. Ghana reports that 81 percent of adults have access to financial services, but the figure falls to 52.7 percent when actual usage and service quality are considered.
The gap is a warning against treating account ownership as the final measure of inclusion. A person may possess a wallet or bank account without using it to save, obtain affordable credit, purchase insurance or build long-term financial security.
Private-sector credit in Ghana remains about 10 percent of gross domestic product, indicating that the growth of payment accounts has not yet produced a comparable expansion in productive financing.
“Digital rails must now support responsible savings, credit, insurance and investment,” Dr Asiama said.
The Bank’s Digital Credit Service Provider framework is intended to bring digital lenders under formal supervision. It is also developing market-wide visibility of borrower exposures to reduce the risk that customers take multiple loans across platforms without lenders seeing their total obligations.
This is particularly important as instant lending applications expand. Digital credit can provide urgently needed working capital and emergency finance, but speed and convenience can conceal high costs, aggressive recovery practices and the accumulation of unaffordable debt.
Open banking forms another part of the inclusion strategy. The initiative is moving from proof of concept to a pilot, potentially allowing customers to authorise regulated providers to use their financial data and offer more competitive products.
If implemented with effective consent and data-protection safeguards, open banking could reduce the information advantage enjoyed by established institutions and help smaller providers assess customers who lack conventional collateral or lengthy banking histories.
The Governor’s third priority was trust. Reported fraud cases in Ghana increased by 48 percent in 2025, with the rise occurring almost entirely among payment service providers, although the total value at risk remained broadly unchanged.
The combination suggests fraud is shifting towards a larger number of relatively small incidents. While each loss may appear limited at the system level, it can be devastating to an individual household and gradually weaken confidence in digital finance.
The Bank’s response includes consumer education, confirmation of a recipient’s identity before payment and stronger controls around SIM replacements. These protections aim to make safety part of the transaction process instead of placing the full burden on consumers after money has been lost.
Institutional defences are also being expanded. The revised Cyber and Information Security Directive, the extension of the Financial Industry Command Security Operations Centre beyond universal banks and forthcoming guidance on artificial intelligence are intended to strengthen ecosystem-wide monitoring.
The planned guidance will cover agentic AI, systems capable of acting with greater autonomy. Such technology may improve fraud detection and customer service, but it could also amplify automated errors, manipulation and cyberattacks if introduced without clear governance.
For the Bank of Ghana, maintaining trust will be critical because payment adoption can reverse if ordinary users believe digital transactions expose them to fraud without offering effective avenues for redress.
The fourth priority concerns regulatory fragmentation. African fintech companies often repeat licensing processes in every market, even when they provide similar services and face comparable risks.
Ghana’s Licence Passporting Framework with the National Bank of Rwanda offers an alternative. More than 10 countries are being engaged to join, potentially creating a regional model under which regulatory assessments can be recognised across participating jurisdictions.
Passporting could reduce expansion costs and help African fintechs achieve scale, but it will require confidence among regulators that supervision, consumer protection and enforcement are sufficiently aligned.
Dr Asiama proposed common standards for payment messaging, confirmation of payees and the sharing of fraud data. These may appear technical, but they determine whether cross-border systems can function safely and whether criminals can exploit gaps between jurisdictions.
The Bank of Ghana offered to share its experience in interoperability, licence passporting and the FICSOC cybersecurity model. That offer strengthens Ghana’s claim to be not merely an adopter of financial technology but a contributor to the continent’s regulatory architecture.
The Governor nevertheless rejected the idea that central banks should choose the technology that ultimately dominates African payments.
“Central banks should not determine which technology succeeds,” Dr Asiama said. “Our role is to ensure that emerging systems are safe, efficient, resilient and inclusive.”
That principle may prove central to the next phase of innovation. Regulators must allow competition among technologies while remaining firm about outcomes: lower costs, wider inclusion, secure transactions and financial stability.
Ghana’s billion-transaction milestone shows that digital payments have achieved scale. The harder task is now to convert that scale into cheaper regional trade, responsible credit and durable public trust.
If Ghana’s pilots become functioning services and its regulatory partnerships widen, the country could help shape how Africa’s increasingly digital economy moves money across borders.
