• Digital financial ecosystem to boost financial inclusion
• Dr. Bawumia spearheading government’s digitization agenda
• Mobile money has improved the efficiency of money transactions
Key players in the fintech sector have been urged to synergize efforts to rake in the full benefits that come with digitization.
According to Vice President, Mahamudu Bawumia investment in innovation is critical to the growth and development of banks and financial institutions.
Addressing participants at the Digital Banking, Innovation and Fintech festival organised by Standard Chartered Ghana, the vice president underscored the need for collaboration despite stiff competition in the digital space.
“Investments in Innovation is crucial. Banks, financial institutions and other stakeholders should invest in digitalisation and innovation. It is the way to go. Just like client service, innovation must be at the very heart of our businesses. It will have impact on new products we churn out, make our customers more satisfied and increase value to stakeholders when done right.
He continued, “Collaboration will cement the ecosystem further. The digital economy thrives on information and collaboration. Banks, fintechs, telecom companies, governments, regulators and consumers should form one big bloc sharing information and feedback that loops everyone. Collaboration will provide opportunities for entities with different specialisations to work together to achieve bigger goals.
“Fundamentally, there is no inconsistency between competition and collaboration. I know that many of the stakeholders in our ecosystem, the private sector is very profit-driven. The Central Bank has to guard, jealously, the safety and stability of the system, and strive to get financial inclusion.” Bawumia added.
The vice president further called on digital innovators to place special focus on inclusion with their products.
“But if we don’t collaborate, then everybody would be in silos, but once we come together in one ecosystem, then we are able to derive economies of scale from that collaboration, where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. We are very focused on inclusion, and this is why it is very important, that as we build these systems, we try to bring everybody on a common platform.
“When you look at the way Mobile Money Interoperability was executed, we got everybody in this ecosystem on the same platform. Before, you had everybody working in different silos. You couldn’t even get moving money from MTN to say Vodafone. That couldn’t even happen.”
“But once we brought everybody on one platform you now have interoperability, which is actually expanding the pie for everybody. We had GH¢35 billion worth of mobile money transactions in 2015; last year it was GH¢570 billion after we have done mobile money interoperability, and next year, we are looking towards a trillion Ghana cedis of mobile money transactions,” Bawumia explained.
“This means rather than competing in our individual silos to share GH¢35 billion, we are going to be competing to share a trillion Ghana cedis, and that is where the collaboration does not contradict competition. We can compete and collaborate at the same time, and this thinking is what informed our launch of the Universal QR Code”, he explained.