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Ghana: DFS Taking Off Amid New Regulations and Market Momentum

Ghana looks increasingly poised to assert its regional leadership in digital financial services in West Africa.

Regulation and Innovation: Hand in Hand?

The United Kingdom's Financial Conduct Authority just launched a new approach to dealing with the natural tension between consumer protection, innovation, and ensuring financial inclusion. Project Innovate is the UK's answer to supporting innovation where it could genuinely improve the lives of consumers.

Regulating for Inclusive Insurance Markets in Ghana

Tremendous gains have been made in Ghana's microinsurance market in recent years. Here's what the National Insurance Commission of Ghana, along with the German Development Corporation, did to help develop the market - and what challenges lie ahead.

Understanding Customers for Financial Innovation in Ghana

The branchless banking market in Ghana is promising but has not gained traction as expected. CGAP and Tigo Cash decided to collaborate in order to better understand what’s preventing Ghanaian customers from actively using mobile money.

Mobile Money: Even Data Analytics Has Limitations

While quantitative data analysis is a useful first step in understanding active mobile customers, it is even more insightful when providers actually go and talk with their customers directly.

Freemium: Spawning An Insurance Market In Ghana

The experience of Tigo Family Care Insurance in Ghana makes the case for freemium services. In underdeveloped markets, offering initial services for free can encourage uptake of paid services in the long run.

Can Phones Drive Insurance Markets? Initial Results From Ghana

Burials in Ghana often put a strain on household budgets of the poor. The insurance market offers very few products, especially to poor customers.Tigo's new mobile insurance product called "Freemium" hopes to change that.

Unintentional Consequences: Branchless Banking In Ghana

Ghana should be a ripe market for mobile money. Yet, as CGAP has written about before, the market has been slow to take off. In this post and video, Elly Ohene-Adu, Head of Financial Inclusion at the Central Bank of Ghana, speaks with CGAP about some of the issues with the current regulations and how the BoG is planning to tackle them.

Delivering Technology Solutions to Susu Collectors

Susu collectors are one of the oldest financial services in Africa. Based largely in Ghana and Nigeria, they visit clients on a regular basis (often daily), collecting very small deposits over the course of a month. This post examines a Ghanaian susu solution which involves a POS device which prints a receipt for the customer and transmits the information back to the susu company’s home office IS system for real-time reconciliation.

Does Branchless Banking Satisfy the Needs of Ghanaian Consumers?

As we saw in the first post on the CGAP survey results from urban and semi-urban Ghana, the basic market conditions for branchless banking services appear good and there are three mobile money deployments, one government entity and one independent provider active in the market. This post will outline the results that form the basis for that belief and draw some conclusions for the providers going forward.

Opportunities in the Ghanaian Payments Market

Despite there being three MNOs, one government institution and one independent branchless banking deployment in Ghana, with two dozen partner banks, thousands of agents and millions in sunk marketing spend between them since 2009, the total active user base is less than 200,000 and all deployments are struggling for break even. Does this mean branchless banking is not going to work in the Ghanaian market?

Over-Indebtedness in Microfinance – Who Should Bear the Risk?

While microfinance products and lending methodologies vary significantly on the ground, two main features of microfinance have made this enormous expansion of access to finance possible: microlending has become scalable due to cost efficient operating models and due to risk management methodologies that ensured high repayment rates.

Branchless Banking Country Notes

Over the past several months, we have taken a close look at the branchless banking industry in our focus countries.

The Last Frontier for Branchless Banking: State of Play in WAEMU

Access to finance in WAEMU is very low, even by comparison to other regions of Africa. The rate of bancarization announced by the BCEAO in December 2010 was 9.5% and 12.7% of the population had an account with an MFI.

Branchless Banking in South Africa

South Africa has often been used as a case study by those with an interest in financial inclusion. The country has an advanced banking infrastructure with nearly 10,000 ATMs and over 100,000 POS devices deployed.

Ghana: Aiming for Interoperability in Branchless Banking

With 6 live branchless banking deployments involving 12 banks, 3 Mobile Network Operators, 2 start-ups and a government entity, the race is on in Ghana to reach the unbanked with branchless banking services.

Branchless Banking and Microinsurance: A Perfect Marriage?

In previous blogs Mark Pickens has lamented the lack of innovation by branchless banking providers in products that go beyond payments. But there are some green-shoots of innovation. In this blog we take a look at some examples of early experiments that we have seen involving in micro-insurance.