Ghana is on the radar of fintech companies, funders and investors as a market that has made significant progress towards financial inclusion in the last five years seeking to better connect poor people to financial services by capturing and digitizing the data of business transactions in the informal sector.
Speaking at the media training breakfast session, David del Ser, Deputy Project Director for Financial Inclusion on Business Runways (FIBR) said, with the financial inclusion 2020 goals approaching, 48 percent of the adult population in Ghana have financial accounts either a bank account, mobile money account or an account with a non-bank financial institution.
He indicated that Ghana is poised to lead financial inclusion in the region with 91 percent of population on mobile phones and a promising regulatory set of best practices on agents and e-money.
David del Ser said this at the Financial Inclusion on Business Runways (FIBR), an initiative of the MasterCard Foundation, and partner Nomanini for the first annual African Fintech Unconference in Accra.
He indicated that they believe in the potential and seek to increase awareness and knowledge of inclusive fintech leadership by Ghana.
According to him, The Unconference seeks to enable fintech companies to engage in smarter partnerships in a fast-moving industry that is ripe for consolidation in Ghana and across Africa.
He added that the African Fintech Unconference is an event driven by the agenda of African fintech innovators and entrepreneurs focusing on their reality and challenges an event concept that was designed with the African fintech innovator in mind.
“FIBR brings its network of fintech players that are exploring new, data-driven ways to leverage the trusted business relationships in low income communities to create linkages to financial services,” he intimated.
The first African Fintech Unconference brought together fintech innovators, banks, telcos, thought leaders and other established financial players in the dynamic fintech sector.
Vahid Monadjem, Chief Executive Officer of Nomanini said for instance, Nomanini has built a strong network of merchants and merchant services across Africa to increase access to payments for everyone, everywhere.
He indicated that the smartphone now makes it possible to propose new and more targeted solutions by a new range of players adding that how this happens and what will succeed is largely untested but it will be a transformative contribution to the financial services sector and how the poor will better manage their money.
Vahid Monadjem added that by 2020, smartphone ownership is projected to rise from about 18 percent to over 50 percent in Africa, generating large amounts of new customer data.
According to him, FIBR sets out to support technology, business and financial partners that can use this data to design and develop new ways to make savings, credit and insurance products available to underserved customers.
He indicated that his outfit has been developing technology to enable real time credit scoring and to increase wallets so merchants can keep trading in Ghana which is convenient for use.
“It worked very well here in Ghana and we have been able to improve merchant activity by 30 percent and we are looking forward to work where the market is really dynamic and the mobile operators, the Fintech and telcos have a very rich ecosystem,” he intimated.
Vahid Monadjem posited that the idea for this conference is to foster connections and communications that enables ecosystem to work together rather than having a number of small Fintech working on solutions that we can share and collaborate.
Romeo Kwame Bugyei, Managing Director, IT Consortium, emphasized that the challenge is that Fintech companies need partnership to drive growth in their business and especially with banks however, the Bank of Ghana does not regulate Fintech companies in the country.
“Therefore when you are doing something that requires deposit or lending the difficulty is that you cannot do it alone so you will need partnership with the financial institutions,” he stated.
According to him, the main challenges is that these small fintech companies finds it difficult to strike a partnership deal with a financial institution that is evenly distributed.
He urged government to allow the sector to operate freely without any regulations so that the small businesses can innovate and grow.
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