By Benjamin Adamafio Commey, GNA
Accra, Aug. 18, GNA – The Bank of Ghana (BoG) has urged banks and microfinance institutions to leverage digital transaction data to expand affordable credit for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
Mrs Matilda Asante-Asiedu, Second Deputy Governor of the BoG, who made the call, said although Ghana had made significant progress in building an interoperable digital financial system, the benefits had not translated sufficiently into affordable and timely credit for businesses, particularly those without traditional collateral.
The situation, she said, remained one of the country’s most persistent economic challenges, despite the expansion of digital payments and the availability of significant capital within the financial system.
Mrs Asante-Asiedu made the call at the ongoing National ICT Week on Monday at the University of Ghana, on the theme: “Innovation At Scale: Creating Opportunities Across Ghana’s Digital Ecosystem.”
It is estimated that Ghana’s annual SME financing gap stood at a whopping $4.8 billion.
Mrs Asante-Asiedu said, over the years, Ghana had built strong foundations for financial innovation, including an interoperable payment system that allowed mobile money wallets, bank accounts and card schemes to transact across providers.
In June this year alone, the Deputy Governor said, mobile money platforms processed about 954 million transactions valued at approximately GH¢493 billion in June 2026 alone, demonstrating that digital payments had become an essential part of everyday commerce.
Registered mobile money accounts stood at about 84.6 million, she said, although active accounts numbered 26.4 million and were supported by more than one million registered agents.
“Digital payments is no longer a peripheral financial system. It is the backbone of everyday commerce in this country,” she said.
Mrs Asante-Asiedu, however, said the country had not achieved a similar level of innovation in credit delivery, creating a major disconnect between how quickly businesses could transact and how slowly they could access financing.
“We have built extraordinary payment rails, but we have not yet built equally extraordinary credit rails,” she noted.
She said many SMEs with strong transaction histories, regular cash flows and verifiable contracts continued to face difficulties obtaining credit because lenders largely relied on conventional collateral such as land, buildings, equipment and cash.
She said transaction histories, confirmed purchase orders, export contracts, receivables and other verifiable future income streams could provide valuable information for assessing the creditworthiness of businesses.
“Think about what a mobile money transaction record actually contains. It is a credit record. We have simply not built the habit of reading it as such,” she said.
She said the disconnect between transaction data and access to credit represented the “single largest unrealised opportunity” in Ghana’s financial system.
To address this, Mrs Asante-Asiedu said, the BoG’s Open Banking and Open Finance frameworks were being developed partly to unlock financing for SMEs by allowing lenders, with appropriate consent, to access relevant financial information.
She stressed that the success of open banking should not be measured only by the number of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) created, but by whether businesses ultimately secured more credit on better terms.
She also identified regulatory fragmentation, cybersecurity, data governance and weak last-mile infrastructure as constraints to scaling financial innovation, and assured that the BoG would strengthen coordination with the National Insurance Commission, Securities and Exchange Commission and the National Pensions Regulatory Authority through the Financial Stability Council.
Mrs Asante-Asiedu said Ghana’s next phase of financial inclusion must move beyond accounts, wallets and transactions to include access to credit, insurance and investment on fair terms.
“The next standard for inclusion should be whether people have access to credit, insurance and investment on fair terms when they need to,” she said.
She urged regulators and industry players to ensure that the same digital infrastructure enabling a market trader to send money within seconds could also help that trader secure affordable financing against a viable business built over several years.
GNA
Edited by Kenneth Odeng Adade
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Reporter: Benjamin Adamafio Commey