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The Ghana Association of Bankers (GAB) has said that its mobile money product, GhanaPay is poised to boost mobile money penetration in Ghana from the current 58% to 85% by the close of next year.
In response to a questionnaire from Techgh24 about the rationale for introducing GhanaPay in the face of the several mobile money platforms in the country, GAB stated that in line with the “Accelerated Execution of National Financial Inclusion and Development strategy– Banks are joining in on this national agenda to increase the adult population’s access to formal financial services from 58% to 85% by 2023.”
Banks are partners of all the mobile money platforms in the country, and they hold the actual cash value of the electronic money on all digital wallets. So, there were concerns about conflict of interest regarding GhanaPay.
But GAB said the main objective of the GhanaPay product and service is to level the playing field for both the banked and unbanked segments of the population, adding that the current mobile money penetration is 58%, which is a clear indication that the market is not saturated.
GAB said they are not interested in churning the mobile customers of the existing players – MTN MobileMoney, AirtelTigo Money, Vodafone Cash, GMoney, Zeepay and Yup, adding that the focus is to bridge the huge gap in the market, so, the strategy would be to rope in new customers all together.
“Consumers are always exploring channels to conduct business and meet their lifestyle needs and GhanaPay intends to close the gap rather than to churn existing users,” it stated.
GAB is therefore leveraging the “impressive” mobile money interoperability (MMI) platform of the Ghana Interbank Payments and Settlement System (GhIPSS) to accelerate adoption and boost inclusion.
“GhanaPay is all about inclusion. Banks are creating a win-win situation for all players by leveraging the impressive interoperability,” it said.
The other selling point for GhanaPay is that it offers completely free transfers of all amounts to all wallets across all networks. That free transfer policy boosted Vodafone Cash market position to number two, and GAB is confident it will drive adoption of GhanaPay as well.
According to GAB, it will fall on all bank branches across the country as GhanaPay agents and also take applications from all interested individual mobile money agents to drive the adoption of GhanaPay.
“Banks have always played a critical role in building the mobile money ecosystem; banks have heavily invested in building an enabling mobile technology infrastructure embedded with state-of-the-art security, which all players are benefiting from; and would continue to do so by taking advantage of new services such as agency banking,” it said.
PayM
Meanwhile, after eight years in operations, UK banks’ PayM platform has just been shut down due to poor performance in terms of usage. over 5 million people in the UK downloaded the App but it recorded just about 500,000 active users, which has been dropping for several years now, until now that it has been shut down.
GAB is yet to provide data on the downloads and usage of GhanaPay, but some industry players believe it will eventually suffer same fate as PayM.
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