Restoring confidence: Building a financial sector that customers can trust at every stage of their journey

Ghana’s financial sector faces a fraud challenge that touches every phase of the customer lifecycle. Understanding it and acting on it is how we build the trust that underpins lasting financial growth.

By Eric Kwaku Mensah, Financial Crimes & Cybersecurity Specialist

Customer trust is the foundation of every successful financial institution. But in Ghana’s banking sector today, that foundation is under sustained pressure. The sector recorded 16,733 fraud cases in 2024 — a 5% rise on the prior year — with a total value at risk of GH¢99 million and a 214% increase in fraud values since 2020. More troubling than any single figure is the pattern behind it: fraud is no longer an isolated incident. It has become lifecycle-embedded, present at every stage of the customer relationship from pre-onboarding to long-term account management.

The good news is that vulnerability and inevitability are not the same thing. Every stage that fraud exploits is also a stage where institutions can intervene, protect, and demonstrate to customers that their money and their trust are well placed.

The threat across the customer journey

Fraud in Ghana does not sit at a single point of exposure. It follows the customer. Before a bank account is opened, advance fee fraud and investment scams intercept potential customers through social media impersonation, with the GAB Q4 2025 report recording zero recovery on such cases. At onboarding, identity theft losses surged nearly nine-fold in 2024 — from GH¢0.67 million to GH¢5.77 million — while forgery and document manipulation reached GH¢53.54 million, the single largest fraud category for banks.

Once customers activate digital channels, ATM and card fraud jumped 89% in 2024. In active transacting, e-transfer fraud dominated the GAB Q4 2025 period — 53 cases, GH¢4.31 million attempted, GH¢2.29 million lost — with cyber and email fraud recording a 100% loss rate. At branch and agent level, staff involvement in fraud rose 33%, with 75% of those cases involving cash suppression. Further along the relationship, credit and lending fraud, remittance manipulation — up 82% year-on-year — and account takeover in dormant accounts all compound the picture.

Solutions: a lifecycle approach to defence

Piecemeal responses are no longer adequate. Strengthening onboarding while ignoring insider risk, or investing in transaction monitoring while neglecting cross-border exposure, simply shifts the problem rather than solving it. The response must match the shape of the threat end to end.

At the pre-onboarding and onboarding stages

• Deploy proactive public education on known fraud narratives — investment scams, visa fraud, impersonation, in partnership with telcos and social media platforms.
• Mandate biometric verification cross-referenced against the NIA database for all account openings, with liveness detection and real-time document authenticity checks.
• Implement device fingerprinting at account opening to detect synthetic identity clusters operating across multiple institutions.

At the transacting and digital channel stages

• Replace SMS-based OTP with app-bound or device-bound authentication. OTP compromise was a central enabler in the majority of e-transfer fraud cases in Q4 2025.
• Deploy real-time behavioural analytics to flag anomalous transaction patterns before settlement, with step-up authentication triggered only on anomalous activity not routine transactions.
• Apply cooling-off windows and velocity controls for first-time high-value wallet transfers, creating an intervention window without blocking the customer experience.

At the branch, credit, and long-term account stages

• Enforce dual-control mechanisms and mandatory staff rotation in cash-handling roles. The current 43% dismissal rate for implicated staff is insufficient as a deterrent.
• Require out-of-band customer confirmation for all loan bookings to prevent fraudulent credit facility creation in customers’ names.
• Build automated re-verification triggers for dormant accounts and accounts with changed contact details, with proactive customer notification on any credential change.

Best practices for the industry

Beyond stage-specific controls, five principles should define the industry’s posture:

• Build a shared fraud intelligence platform: Ghana’s fraud problem is multi-institutional. A real-time database of confirmed fraudster identities, mobile wallet blacklists and device fingerprints (where possible) accessible to all banks, SDIs, PSPs, and telcos simultaneously is the single highest-impact investment the sector can make. The technology and regulatory mandate both exist. What is needed is collective will.
• Treat fraud as enterprise risk: Fraud risk must sit alongside credit and liquidity risk on the board agenda with dedicated budgets, data-driven reporting to senior management, and joint accountability across product, operations, and risk teams.
• Design for invisible friction, not zero friction: Risk-based authentication, passive biometrics, and intelligent delays protect customers without degrading experience. The goal is not to slow banking down. It is to ensure that speed works for the customer and against the fraudster.
• Invest in customer education as a hard control: A significant share of 2024 and 2025 losses involved customers who were deceived into authorising their own transactions. Scenario-specific fraud education delivered at channel activation and continuously through digital channels directly reduces loss rates.
• Close the mobile money recovery gap: Formal, enforceable protocols between banks and telcos for real-time wallet blocking and fund tracing are not optional infrastructure. They are the difference between a fraud that is contained and a fraud that is permanent.

The opportunity in the obligation

Ghana’s financial sector has brought millions into formal financial services through mobile money, digital onboarding, and real-time payments. Protecting that infrastructure from fraud is not a technical footnote to that story. It is central to it. The institutions that invest seriously in lifecycle fraud resilience will not just reduce losses, they will earn the loyalty of customers who have every reason to trust them.

The five-year trajectory does not have to continue. The data is clear. The solutions are available. What remains is the decision (individual and collective) to act on both.

Sources:

Bank of Ghana — Banks, SDIs and PSPs 2024 Fraud Report (Notice No. BG/GOV/SEC/2025/09, April 2025)

Ghana Association of Banks — Industry Fraud Report: September–December 2025

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