Newz“We built extraordinary payment rails. Now we build the credit rails.” At the Distinguished Digital Finance Lecture, held during the National ICT Week, our Deputy Governor Matilda Asante- Asiedu mentioned this in her remarks. The Bank of Ghana has put a number on something the market has felt for years: an #SME financing gap of roughly $4.8 billion, among the most severe on the continent, in a country with one of Africa’s more capable financial systems.
Alongside it came a proposition I think is the most important thing said about Ghanaian financial services this year. Access to credit on fair terms should become the benchmark against which financial inclusion is measured, and that open banking reform should be aimed squarely at lending to businesses that cannot offer conventional collateral. Ghana has spent fifteen years building #retail #payment infrastructure that reaches into markets, farms and lorry parks no branch network ever served.
On the metrics we set for ourselves a decade ago, we succeeded. Those metrics have now outlived their usefulness. Account ownership and transaction volume tell us people can move money.
They tell us nothing about whether people can build anything with it. We did not build equally extraordinary credit rails. And the missing rail is not capital.
The sentence should change how regulated #FSPs think. For anyone working in credit risk or #Data, the operational implication of this agenda is immediate. Institutions already hold transaction history.
Cash flow, merchant activity, how frequently money comes in, whether volumes are growing or shrinking, how predictable income is. The regulator has signalled that it understands this. This means failing to convert that data into credit assessment has moved from a commercial choice to a supervisory concern.
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