By Kofi OWUSU-NHYIRA
When MTN Ghana launched Mobile Money in 2009, banks dismissed it as an amusing experiment, confident it held no real potential to disrupt their core business. Regulators, confronted with a product that crossed institutional boundaries they had long treated as fixed, debated where it fit in the rulebook. Most Ghanaians who heard the term “mobile money” likely assumed it was another short-lived telco promotion.
I did not know then that this small experiment would shape the next decade and a half of my professional life.
By 2012, when I started what would eventually become Nsano, mobile money had gained momentum, but the real adoption curve was still ahead. We believed what the pitch decks promised: that technology would unlock a financial revolution, delivering tailored services to underserved populations, app-driven financial education, structured merchant payments, and a smooth march toward a cash-lite economy.
Fifteen years later, the truth is richer and more complex. Mobile money has radically transformed Ghana’s financial landscape, but not in the linear way most of us anticipated. The gaps and distortions it exposed are as important as its successes, because they point to what the next phase must confront.
The adoption curve no one anticipated
Between 2012 and 2016, active mobile money accounts grew by more than 700 percent. By the end of 2024, Ghana had 72.9 million registered e-money accounts and 23.5 million active accounts, more than twice the country’s population in registered accounts and clear evidence of national-scale penetration.
By February 2025, registered mobile money accounts had risen further to about 74.1 million.
The significant gap between registrations and active usage highlighted the extent to which early users had to improvise around design, regulatory, and market gaps.
Interoperability did not exist, so many people opened wallets on multiple networks to reduce friction and cost when sending or receiving money.
Know-your-customer (KYC) standards were inconsistent, and registration was often agent-driven, encouraging multiple and low-commitment sign-ups.
Consumer protection frameworks were still emerging, so households created backup wallets for emergencies, seasonal needs, forgotten PINs, or episodic remittances.
Promotional campaigns further encouraged registrations even when users did not yet have a clear use case. In other words, registrations reflected experimentation, while active usage reflected utility.
That experimentation became one of the system’s most important feedback loops.
User Behaviour Pushed the Ecosystem to Evolve
Providers learned quickly that users did not want sophisticated apps. They wanted simpler onboarding, USSD-driven journeys that worked on any device, dense and trusted agent networks, and low-friction cross-network transfers.
Policymakers learned that some frictions could not be left to the market to resolve. Multi-wallet behaviour was constraining growth across the ecosystem.
Around the same time, multiple efforts emerged to address this challenge. Nsano developed Move, the first interoperable money-movement platform in Ghana, demonstrating that cross-network transfers were technically feasible. Simultaneously, the Bank of Ghana was working with industry stakeholders to build the case for system-wide interoperability.
These parallel efforts reinforced a shared conclusion: the ecosystem was ready for coordinated solutions. The Bank of Ghana directed the Ghana Interbank Payment and Settlement Systems (GhIPSS) to develop the Mobile Money Interoperability platform. It launched in 2018, enabling transfers across wallets and between wallets and bank accounts at national scale.
Regulators also learned where legal and supervisory gaps lay. User improvisation helped catalyse clearer guidelines for Electronic Money Issuers, consolidation of KYC expectations, early consumer protection measures, and ultimately the Payment Systems and Services Act, 2019 (Act 987), which formalised licence categories for EMIs, Payment Service Providers, and Payment and Financial Technology Service Providers.
Technology Did Not Drive Adoption. People Did.
The reasons mobile money took off in Ghana have relatively little to do with technological sophistication and everything to do with behavioural fit.
Agents, not apps
Ghana’s mobile money story was built on human infrastructure. By 2024, there were roughly 896,000 registered agents, with around 411,000 active. These agents became the de facto micro-branches of the financial system.
For millions of first-time users, trust lived in the person behind the branded telco umbrella, not in sophisticated platforms or polished user interfaces.
USSD, not smartphones
Despite rising smartphone penetration, most mobile money transactions in Ghana still occur over USSD rather than apps. USSD requires no data, no storage space, and minimal digital literacy. It works on any handset.
Simplicity and functionality, not feature richness, carried the system.
Social payments, not formal products
Across African markets, peer-to-peer flows, household remittances, and small-value payments remain the dominant mobile money use cases. Ghana is no exception.
The backbone of usage has been family support, payments to artisans and informal workers, market and petty trading flows, and rural-urban remittances.
Mobile money’s success came from behavioural fit, not technological sophistication.
But success often hides its blind spots.
In Part Two, I examine what we misread: the assumptions that did not hold, and the gap that emerged between policy intent and market reality.
Kofi Owusu-Nhyira is a fintech founder and policy advisor based in Ghana. He writes from experience building and navigating Africa’s digital finance ecosystem.
www.owusunhyira.com
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