Second Deputy Governor of the Bank of Ghana, Matilda Asante-Asiedu, says access to credit, insurance and investment on fair terms should become the next benchmark for measuring financial inclusion in Ghana.
She said the country had made significant progress in expanding access to financial services through mobile money and interoperable payment systems, but many small businesses remained excluded from the credit system.
“The next standard for inclusion when we measure our performance as a country should be whether people have access to credit, insurance and investment on fair terms when they need to,” she said.
Speaking at the Distinguished Digital Finance Lecture during National ICT Week, Matilda Asante-Asiedu said Ghana’s financial system had developed sophisticated payment infrastructure but had yet to build equally effective credit channels.
She pointed to the $4.8 billion annual financing gap facing Small and Medium Enterprises, describing it as one of the most severe gaps on the continent despite Ghana’s comparatively advanced financial system.
“We have built extraordinary payment rails, but we have not yet built equally extraordinary credit rails,” she observed.
According to her, the disconnect between transaction data and access to credit represents a major opportunity for Ghana’s financial sector.
She argued that digital payment histories could provide useful information for assessing the creditworthiness of small businesses.
“It shows merchant payment activity, how frequent transactions occur, whether volumes are growing or falling, and how regular and predictable income is. This is not just background information. It is a credit record,” she stressed.
Matilda Asante-Asiedu also identified the reliance on traditional collateral, particularly land and buildings, as a constraint on SME financing.
She said businesses with strong cash flows, contracts and receivables could still be denied credit because their assets did not meet conventional collateral requirements.
She called for the implementation of open banking and open finance frameworks to help bridge the financing gap, stressing that their success should be measured by increased access to credit rather than the number of application programming interfaces developed.
“The SME financing gap [should be] the explicit measure of success,” she said.
The Second Deputy Governor further called for greater regulatory coordination among the Bank of Ghana, National Insurance Commission, Securities and Exchange Commission and the Pensions Regulatory Authority to ensure innovation is assessed based on the risks involved.
She also urged stronger cybersecurity capacity across the financial system, including among smaller institutions, as Ghana expands digital financial services.
Matilda Asante-Asiedu said the goal should be to ensure that the same digital infrastructure that enables a market trader to send money instantly can also allow her to borrow against the business she has built and access financial services on competitive terms.
“Our task now as a people, as regulators, as industry players, is to make sure that the same phone that lets a market trader in Techiman send money in 3 seconds also lets her borrow against the business she has spent a decade building and lets her choose preferential terms instead of being limited to whatever her financial services provider offers to her. For me, this is what innovation at scale means, and that is the work that all of us must do together,” she remarked.
