The CEO of Ghana Interbank Payments and Settlements Systems (GhIPSS), Archie Hesse and Ghana’s banking-sector mobile money platform, GhanaPay have received honours at this year’s Digital Economy Awards in Nairobi, Kenya.
GhanaPay was adjudged The Best Government Payment App of the Year, while Archie Hesse was among the Africa Top 50 Digital Economy Leaders for this year.
The Digital Economy Awards, which is now in its eight year, is a scheme in partnership with the Africa Digital Economy Forum to honour Africa’s digital champions, innovators, creatives and inventions across multiple of the digital economy.
Techfocus24 run into Archie Hesse at the launch of the second State of Inclusive Instant Payments Systems (SIIPS) in Africa Report by AfricaNenda in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and he threw more light on the awards he and GhanaPay have been nominated for.
In terms of achievements, Archie Hesse has been at the forefront of building what today is described in the SIIPS 2023 report as one of the most progressive to mature inclusive payment systems on the continent – what Archie calls the financial inclusion triangle in Ghana.
The main elements of the triangle are GhIPSS Instant Pay (GIP) – which integrates banks; the Mobile Money Interoperability (MMI), which links banks and telcos/Fintechs; and Ezwitch, which enables payments from government to individual through the banks.
Archie Hesse has also led GhIPSS to build and universal QR Code (GHQR), which has standards that has made it an example to several countries across the world, including Singapore, Malaysia, Kenya, Somalia and several others.
Indeed, several other African countries continue to directly tap on the expertise of Archie to build their own state-owned payment switches. In fact, AfricaNenda led a team of central bank and payment switches executives to Ghana last year to learn first hand what GhIPSS in particular, and other stakeholders are doing in Ghana.
My passion has always been in the area of transformational technology and so for it to be recognized and rewards, that is something I am grateful for and I think we as a country should celebrate,” he told Techfocus24.
GhanaPay
Additionally, Archie Hesse and GhIPSS were very instrumental in establishing the GhanaPay Mobile Money platform, which is owned by all commercial banks in Ghana and hosted by GhIPSS. This is why it was nominated in the Government Payment App category.
GhanaPay is a unique mobile money platform that has always offered free money transfer from day one. This is possible because all mobile money floats in the country are lodged with the banks so they have chosen to offer free transfers since they are able to invest the float and make some profit.
By doing so, GhanaPay is poised to lead the ecosystem to drive mobile money transaction fees down as a way of deepening adoption and bridging the inclusivity gap.
The other advantage GhanaPay brings to the industry is that people in the informal sector, who could not meet the requirement for a bank account but have mobile money wallet, can now be given banking services such as loans based on the activities on their mobile money wallets as monitored by the banks.
So, an individual who obtains a GhanaPay wallet, but does not have a regular bank account, can still qualify for a loan from a bank based on their activities on the wallet. That way, the banks are now growing their support for the informal sector through the GhanaPay channel.
Real-time transaction booming
In terms of what the two awards mean for Ghana, Archie Hesse noted that statistics show that digital financial transactions in Ghana is fast shifting towards real-time payments, as the service is now being used widely by both the banked and unbanked Ghanaians.
He noted that individuals who used to rely solely on banking transactions are reducing significantly and moving towards the real-time transactions.
About eight years ago when we started, majority of our transactions were in the clearinghouse, followed by cards and real-time transactions came in third. But now over 65% of transactions in real-time,” he said.
This according to him, indicates that the foresight to build real-time rails in Ghana was a good one and it is paying off. But what is left now is to find a lot of use cases and encourage the FinTechs to innovate and provide more services to individuals, businesses and government.
Banks used to be our main partners when we started but with the boom in real-time transactions, the FinTechs have taken over and we need to find a way to forge even closer relationship with them to grow the ecosystem even further,” Archie Hesse stated.