Ghana’s fintech has enormous untapped prospects

A Financial Analyst, Martin Kwame Awagah, says, Ghana’s financial technology (fintech) sector has numerous prospects that investors can tap into to increase customer reach and profit.

The prospects, which cut across every sector of the economy with the services sector being major beneficiaries, he said, presented economic gains to the country, including augmenting financial inclusiveness.

Speaking at a virtual media briefing ahead of the 2021 Ghana Fintech Outlook report and awards night, Mr Awagah, said, investors could tap into the opportunities in Ghana’s banking and financial services, telecommunications, health, education, and agriculture sector to increase profit.

The Ghana Fintech Outlook project was introduced in 2020 by Arkel Consult and Abjel Communications to educate Ghanaians on how to work in an ecosystem and transform the financial status of Ghana through digitalisation.

He said, “When you look at mobile money operations alone in Ghana, the prospects in the fintech sector are huge and bright. In a report by the Bank of Ghana (BoG) recently, MoMo transactions outweighed the banking sector’s volume of transactions in the country.”

“So, that is just a narrative to tell you that the prospects of fintech are large, because MoMo, is a fintech platform and that is where we are seeing a lot of changes, and fintech in providing financial inclusiveness,” Mr Awagah who also is a financial inclusion professional, added.

MoMo transactions for the first half of 2021 was GH₵89.1 billion, a 97 percent increase from the GH₵43.8 billion that was recorded in the same period last year.

He, however, raised concerns over the lack of data on the fintech sector in the country, noting that many businesses were losing huge sums of money due to unavailability of data on the sector.

Mr Awagah who is the Director of Akel Consults and Management Services Limited, said that although the fintech ecosystem was endowed with many prospects, “the lack of data actually affect business operations in terms of profitability, scaling and growth.”

“Data is the new oil, so we need to realign our focus on how we can leverage on data to be able to achieve economic empowerment and growth in all sectors of the economy,” he urged.

The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Abjel Communications, a communications agency, Adisa Amanor-Wilks, also said, the speeding up of economic development in the country required availability of data to all stakeholders.

“For every economy to develop, and for any sector to be able to accelerate action, data is so key. For a country like ours we really need to get our data together and be able to provide this data to track how the sector is developing.”

Source: GNA