The Bank of Ghana is pushing for a decisive shift in how economic planners evaluate digital progress, asserting that access to affordable credit, insurance, and investment must serve as the real standard for measuring financial inclusion in Ghana rather than merely celebrating high transaction numbers on mobile money wallets.
Delivering the keynote at the Distinguished Digital Finance Lecture during National ICT Week, Second Deputy Governor Matilda Asante-Asiedu observed that while interoperable networks have successfully connected millions to digital payment systems, small businesses remain largely cut off from formal debt markets.
"The next standard for inclusion when we measure our performance as a country should be whether people have access to credit, insurance and investment on fair terms when they need to," Asante-Asiedu stated. "We have built extraordinary payment rails, but we have not yet built equally extraordinary credit rails."
Confronting the $4.8 Billion SME Financing Deficit
Asante-Asiedu drew attention to an annual SME financing shortfall of 4.8 billion dollars, describing it as one of the steepest credit deficits on the continent despite Ghana operating one of Africa's most technically sophisticated digital payments environments.
A major bottleneck stifling commercial lending is the industry’s rigid insistence on conventional physical collateral like land and buildings.
Commercial loan officers routinely turn away viable small enterprises with strong cash flows, active supply contracts, and solid receivables simply because their operational assets do not fit rigid historical underwriting guidelines.
The Deputy Governor argued that years of digital merchant transactions provide the exact operational trail lenders need to evaluate real-time solvency.
"It shows merchant payment activity, how frequent transactions occur, whether volumes are growing or falling, and how regular and predictable income is. This is not just background information. It is a credit record." - Asante-Asiedu
Open Finance and Cross-Regulatory Alignment
To dismantle these lending barriers, Asante-Asiedu called for the rapid deployment of open banking and open finance regimes that allow customer data to move securely across financial institutions. However, she warned against treating software integrations as victories on their own.
"The SME financing gap should be the explicit measure of success," she said, stressing that technical progress matters only when it releases actual capital to entrepreneurs.
She urged deeper regulatory alignment among the Bank of Ghana, the National Insurance Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the National Pensions Regulatory Authority to ensure oversight matches actual transaction risks while demanding that smaller financial firms urgently upgrade their cybersecurity defenses.
Bringing Innovation to Grassroots Traders
"Our task now as a people, as regulators, as industry players, is to make sure that the same phone that lets a market trader in Techiman send money in 3 seconds also lets her borrow against the business she has spent a decade building and lets her choose preferential terms instead of being limited to whatever her financial services provider offers to her." - Asante-Asiedu
Asante-Asiedu noted, "For me, this is what innovation at scale means, and that is the work that all of us must do together."
Closing her remarks, the central bank chief challenged fintech developers and commercial bankers to translate technical sophistication into tangible upward mobility for ordinary market women and small trade operators.
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