Active customer accounts for mobile money transactions plummeted to 17.2 million accounts from a record high of 17.8 million, reflecting a decline by 600,000 accounts in April 2021.

After experiencing an accelerated average growth at a rate of approximately 2.5 percent on a month-on-month basis, active mobile money accounts sharply declined by 3.4 percent in April 2021.

According to the Bank of Ghana’s Summary of Economic and Financial Data, this represents the first decline since April last year. Glaringly, this decline is likely to emanate from the directive implemented by MTN MoMo on April 2, to have all registered MoMo users present valid ID cards before withdrawals can be processed.

Although customers’ safety and security of deposits against fraud is at the fore of this regulatory requirement and subsequent enforcement, the additional processes required and the idea of carrying ID cards around presents a ‘mountain’ of inconveniences for customers. Thus, leading to the fall in active users of the service.

More so, mobile money users deem the use of ID cards as no different from cards required for ATM use, although, mobile money vendors are densely situated across the country as compared to installed ATMs.

As a consequence, the total volume of mobile money transactions also declined from 339 million transactions to 323 million transactions, registering a fall of 3.9 percent in April 2021. Albeit, total value of transactions increased marginally from GHS 82.3 billion to GHS 83.8 billion, reflecting a GHS 0.5 billion in value of transactions.

Compared with an over 20% increase in the value of mobile money transactions between February and March 2021, a rise of 0.6% in transactions value between March and April presents a not-so encouraging performance in the period.

Analysis of data on mobile money agents and interoperability

Meanwhile, within this period, registered mobile money accounts continued to increase reaching 42.1 million registered accounts rising from 41.9 million accounts. Also, registered agents increased from 476,000 in March 2021 to 485,000, among whom number of active agents trended high increasing by 11,000 active agents.

Based on the available data, the total amount of transactions that used the Mobile Money interoperability platform increased from GHS 1333.1 million to GHS1367.7 million, representing a 2.6% increase in April 2021.

Despite the rise in volume of transactions on the interoperability platform, the total number of transactions increased marginally by 0.3 million (8.2 million in March to 8.5 million in April).

The above data on mobile money interoperability indicates an overall positive outturn in performance. An increase in the value of transactions as well as number of transactions may well be due to the non-coverage of the ID-card requirement for the completion of such transactions.

Mobile money transactions, for the last couple of years have been a game-changer in the country’s digitization agenda. It has also provided a vast array of opportunities for the non-banked many to engage in financial transactions, thus improving financial inclusion.

While efforts are being geared towards ensuring seamless transactions occur with the use of mobile money platforms, any introduction of requirements that makes it laborious to conduct transactions with the platform will only have individuals regress in their use.