There’s no question that mobile money is already part of everyday life in Ghana. Payments move between wallets and bank accounts over interoperable infrastructure. The Ghana Card serves as a national digital identity layer, and the Bank of Ghana actively supports digital financial services. In fact, many emerging markets are still trying to build foundations that Ghana already has in place.
According to the Bank of Ghana, around 81% of adults own an account, yet its latest payment systems report shows that once access, usage and quality are all measured, inclusion sits closer to 52.7%. “Giving someone an account is relatively easy compared with making that account genuinely useful,” says Shiona Blundell, Business Development Executive at Sybrin.
For Blundell, the Ghana Card and interoperability have removed two enormous sources of friction by establishing who a customer is and letting money move beyond a single closed network. “But they’re enablers, not endpoints,” she continues. “So, we need to ask what we can now do for people that we couldn’t do before.” A farmer’s identity can be confirmed and his money moved, yet neither tells a lender whether he can get affordable credit to buy seed before planting or save enough to ride out a bad season.
Redrawing the map
“The last-mile gap is between having access to a financial service and actually being able to use that service to materially improve your economic position,” explains Blundell.
The last mile is no longer only measured by whether a rural customer has a branch nearby or a signal strong enough to connect. A market trader who receives mobile money is digitally included, but that alone won’t help them buy stock before a busy period or cope with a sick child without borrowing.
When a World Bank survey asked Ghanaians where they would find emergency money within 30 days, over 40% named family or friends and only about a quarter said savings. “If you’re digitally included, but any unexpected expense pushes your household into crisis, I don’t think we’ve finished the job,” she adds.
Ghana has more than 26 million active mobile money accounts carrying billions of transactions, yet cash is still widely used in everyday trade. And it makes sense – with no passwords or failed transactions, the cost of a payment is clear. Digital methods should be more convenient, trusted or affordable before anyone abandons a habit that has served them for years.
“Cash is understood. It works almost everywhere,” she says. “The goal should not be to force every payment into one channel, but to make sure customers and businesses can use the option that is most appropriate for the transaction at hand.”
Credit that fits
Around 1.69 million of Ghana’s roughly 1.9 million business establishments are micro businesses, many without a payslip or audited financial statements to show a lender.
“You need to start with how the customer actually lives and trades, then design the financial service around their reality,” says Blundell, who explains that mobile money activity and transaction patterns can reveal turnover, cashflow and seasonality where paperwork cannot.
“The real success story isn’t that the trader accepts a QR payment. It’s that two years later, they’ve added another store, employed three more people or bought equipment because the digital activity helped unlock appropriately priced finance,” she says.
And then there’s Ghana’s 147 community banking institutions, which run around 1 000 branches for more than 8 million customers. Blundell says they’re the ones who understand local businesses in ways a centrally generated customer profile cannot.
“Technology gives local institutions scale, but local relationships give technology context,” she adds. Fintechs and mobile operators widen that reach, although Blundell believes that the first partner is always the customer and a partnership should be judged by what it made possible for them. “If the answer is nothing meaningful, it isn’t an ecosystem. It’s really just a supply chain.”
Measuring change
Ultimately, banks in Ghana need to look beyond access and measure a customer's financial health, which means looking at whether that person can save, borrow responsibly and grow a business. It’s whether they are stronger after five years with the bank than on the day they joined.
“Access is an input; it isn’t the outcome,” says Blundell. “We can’t celebrate access to credit if the credit makes the customer poorer or more vulnerable. If financial services aren’t helping Ghanaians build resilience and participate more fully in the economy… then we need to be brave and ask the question: what exactly are we including them in?”
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