Bawumia is confident in the prospect of GhanaPay platform
BoG Governor hails country's migration to electronic payment
The Bank of Ghana has charged banks to work further hard to reduce the use of cash and cheque for payment following the launch of the GhanaPay platform.
Governor of the Central Bank, Dr Ernest Addison, in a speech, observed that the country's migration to electronic payments has been laudable.
"GhIPSS Instant Pay transactions valued at GH¢420,000 in 2016 surged exponentially to GH¢31.4 billion in 2021.
"In tandem, both the value of mobile money transactions and registered mobile money agents also increased thirteen and four-folds, respectively, in 2021.
"Another key development was that Ghana's cash usage measured by Currency in Circulation as a ratio of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) declined from 6.8 per cent in 2016 to 4.7 per cent in 2021.
"In addition, Ghana's cheque usage per capita, which was 25.67 in 2016, declined to 18.9 in 2021," he said.
Despite these successes, however, Dr. Ernest Addison noted that there was still a significant number of persons who used cash and cheque as modes of payment despite the convenience of electronic payments.
Consequently, Dr. Addison encourages banks to use the newly launched GhanaPay platform to solve the market gap.
"Beyond the tremendous success at making payments convenient and accessible to consumers, cash payments and cheque usage remain prevalent, while electronic payment adoption is uneven across regions and segments of the population.
"In this regard, there exists opportunities for more inclusive and broad-based adoption of electronic payment.
"With the introduction of GhanaPay, the banking sector can address this market gap through continuous collaboration to expand merchant acceptance with a greater focus on lower-tier merchants.
"There is no doubt that the appropriate support for the payment systems value chain and public education, infrastructure light solutions such as the GhanaPay, can boost electronic payment acceptance," Dr. Addison said.
GhanaPay will provide an open application that leverages on network
infrastructure of the entire banking industry.
With GhanaPay, merchants do not necessarily need to maintain banking relationships with several banks to receive bill payments from other bank customers.
In addition, customers only need to maintain an account with a bank to make bill payments to the entire network of customers and merchants registered with GhanaPay.
Governor of Bank of Ghana, Dr. Ernest Addison