Vice President, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, has revealed that Ghana is the only country in Africa that has implemented the mobile money interoperability to make it easier for persons to engage in transactions.
According to him, if one considers operating a mobile money account and making payments, it is just like they having a bank account. He revealed that most people don’t even use their bank account anymore, as they prefer to just use their mobile money account.
Dr Bawumia indicated that when the Akufo-Addo administration came into office this was one of the problems government wanted to solve by introducing the interoperability. As a result,“90 per cent of adult Ghanaians either have MoMo account or a bank account”, with the two functioning in similar ways.
“Ghana is the only country in Africa that has implemented this mobile money interoperability that has made Ghana the fastest growing Mobile Money market in Africa. Because of interoperability, it means the mobile money account acts like bank account because they are very much interoperable.”
Dr Mahamudu Bawumia
Dr Bawumia stated that prior to mobile money interoperability an individual couldn’t “move money from MTN to Vodafone” but today, he can do that because of interoperability. He iterated that due to the relevance of interoperability one can also “move money from your bank account to your mobile money wallet and mobile money wallet to your bank” account.
“… You can even receive remittances from abroad straight into your mobile phone and you don’t have to go to your bank.”
Dr Mahamudu Bawumia
Speaking at the Biennial Joint Session of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, A.M.E.Zion church in Accra today, August 25, 2022, Dr Bawumia emphasized that governments are elected to solve problems and it is therefore important for politicians who have been given the mandate to govern to tell the people specific problems they have solved since their assumption of office.
“So at this stage, in the context of all the issues that we are dealing with, the cost of living going up so astronomically, let me share with you some of the problems that we have solved or are solving over the last six years we have been in government.”
Dr Mahamudu Bawumia
Among other things, the Vice President highlighted that government has implemented the National Identification system, the Ghana Card, for the first time since independence.
“Today, if you have a Ghana Card and you are a student, you no longer need a guarantor to get a loan for the tertiary education. We did not have a workable address system, today, we have implemented a national digital property address system. There is no place in Ghana, village or town, wherever that does not have a digital address because Ghana now has a digital address system. We have implemented Mobile Money interoperability, today customers of one telco can transfer mobile money to another telco.”
Dr Mahamudu Bawumia
It will be recalled that in 2018, Vice President Dr Mahamudu Bawumia launched the first mobile money payments interoperability system in Ghana.
This follows a challenge issued by the Vice President last year to the Bank of Ghana, the Ghana Interbank Payment and Settlement Systems (GhIPSS), the Telcos and financial institutions to ensure that mobile money platforms were interoperable to make banking services more accessible to the large unbanked population, estimated to be about 70%.
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