Ghana's dominant mobile money operator is pressing the country's fintech industry to accelerate its shift from text-based USSD services to smartphone apps, arguing that the change is essential both to improve customer experience and to blunt a wave of increasingly sophisticated fraud.
Shaibu Haruna, chief executive of MobileMoney (MoMo) Fintech Limited, told a gathering of industry executives including members of the Journalists for Business Advocacy (JBA) at the Fintech Partners Exchange Dialogue in Accra that payments infrastructure remained lopsided: about seven in ten customers now own smartphones, yet barely 1.2 per cent of transactions run through mobile apps, with the vast majority still processed via USSD, the menu-driven text protocol that has underpinned mobile money since its launch in Ghana more than a decade ago.
The disparity, he suggested, is no longer simply a matter of consumer habit. It has become a structural vulnerability.
As mobile money has grown into the backbone of everyday commerce in Ghana — used for everything from paying school fees to settling market-stall transactions — it has also become an increasingly attractive target for criminal networks that coordinate across platforms, blending social engineering with messaging apps to defraud users. USSD's relative simplicity, executives at the dialogue noted, leaves it more exposed to interception and impersonation than app-based channels, which can layer in biometric verification, encryption and real-time monitoring.
Fraud has evolved into organised digital networks and requires joint action across the ecosystem to manage effectively," Mr Haruna said, adding that no single company could contain the threat alone.
Multi-platform
He described the shift toward more sophisticated, multi-platform fraud schemes as a step change from the isolated scams that once characterised mobile money's early years, and said the industry's response would need to match that evolution — with real-time data-sharing between operators, banks and telecoms regulators rather than fragmented, company-by-company defences.
Even so, Mr Haruna was careful to frame the migration to apps as a gradual one rather than an abrupt pivot away from USSD, a service that remains a lifeline for customers without smartphones or reliable, affordable internet access — still a meaningful share of Ghana's population, particularly outside major urban centres.
He said the industry's task was to upgrade both channels in parallel, narrowing the gap in security and convenience between them rather than forcing users onto a platform many cannot yet reliably access. Financial inclusion, he argued, could not be sacrificed at the altar of modernisation.
We needed to move customers steadily from USSD to apps while improving both channels to reduce friction and strengthen user experience," he said, adding that services needed to be designed so they felt intuitive and dependable regardless of which channel a customer used.
The push comes as the country’s fintech sector navigates a wave of regulatory change. Mr Haruna pointed to recent measures from the Bank of Ghana that he said would help deepen the country's nascent credit market — a notable shift for an economy that has long operated on a largely prepaid basis, where consumers must hold funds before they can transact, a structural constraint that has limited the reach of consumer and small-business lending compared with markets where credit histories are more readily built and shared.
Digital lending
Digital lending, he said, offered a path toward more flexible financing for households and small businesses alike, potentially unlocking working capital for the informal traders and micro-enterprises that make up a large share of Ghana's economy.
He acknowledged, however, that the same regulatory shifts creating room for new entrants and new lending models could just as easily unsettle incumbents' existing business models, making coordination between operators and regulators increasingly important as the rules of the game evolve.
Haruna said MoMo had already completed upgrades intended to improve platform stability during periods of peak demand, and pledged continued investment in system capacity as transaction volumes rise.
We had strengthened system capacity and would continue investing to ensure reliability as transaction volumes increased," he said.
Market concentration
On the question of market concentration — a persistent undercurrent in Ghana's fintech debates given MoMo's scale and its position as the default payments rail for millions of Ghanaians — Mr Haruna pushed back against suggestions that the company's dominance was crowding out competition or innovation.
He argued that mobile wallets represent only one of several revenue streams in a broader and increasingly diversified sector, one that also spans merchant payments, savings products, insurance distribution and, increasingly, credit.
He disclosed that the company generated roughly GH¢6 billion in revenue last year, a substantial share of which was ploughed back into operations and infrastructure rather than distributed as profit. Dividends, he said, were paid out to more than 100,000 shareholders, a detail he offered as evidence that the company's success was broadly shared rather than concentrated.
He cast the company's role in explicitly national terms, describing it as "part of national digital infrastructure" supporting broader economic growth and financial inclusion — language that positions MoMo not merely as a commercial actor but as a quasi-public utility whose stability and reach carry implications well beyond its balance sheet.
Susan Yawson, MoMo's chief financial officer, struck a similarly pragmatic note, telling delegates that the dialogue was designed to move stakeholders from talk to action. She said participants were expected to leave with agreed priorities and timelines for reducing fraud, stressing that execution, not further discussion, would determine whether the industry's ambitions were realised.
The emphasis on concrete deliverables, rather than another round of high-level commitments, reflected what several attendees described as growing impatience across the sector with talk-shops that produce communiqués but little coordinated follow-through.
"We had focused on building partnerships and agreeing on concrete steps to reduce fraud and strengthen trust in the system," Yawson said.
Comments