The Bank of Ghana (BoG) is set to tap into the country's growing digital transaction data to develop solutions aimed at closing the annual small and medium enterprises (SME) financing gap, estimated at $4.8 billion.
The plan is to enable lenders to use SMEs' transaction histories, cash flows and payment patterns as additional evidence of creditworthiness, particularly for businesses that lack traditional collateral such as land and buildings.
Speaking at a session of National ICT Week 2026 at the University of Ghana in Accra on Monday, the Second Deputy Governor of BoG, Matilda Asante-Asiedu, said the gap between transaction data and access to credit represents the country's single largest unrealised opportunity, despite considerable growth in digital payments and financial infrastructure.
"I think the most persistent bottleneck is not technology, not at all. It is the financing gap facing the various SMEs our digital infrastructure was built to serve, as recent estimates place Ghana's SME gap at $4.8 billion annually," she said. "That's one of the most severe gaps on the continent despite our comparatively sophisticated financial system. That disconnect between transaction data and credit access, in my view, is the single largest unrealised opportunity in history."
National ICT Week 2026, held under the theme "Innovation at scale: Creating opportunities across Ghana's digital ecosystem," is a four day event bringing together government, academia, industry players, innovators and young technology professionals to exchange ideas and strengthen collaboration around Ghana's digital development. Organised by the National Information Technology Agency (NITA) alongside key technology and corporate partners, the event opened on Monday and closes Wednesday.
Asante-Asiedu said mobile money transaction records could give lenders valuable insight into the cash flows, payment patterns and income consistency of SME operators, and argued they should increasingly be treated as a form of credit record. She said the central bank is advancing its Open Banking and Open Finance frameworks to let businesses use their transaction histories to access financing from competing providers, while also exploring reforms that would allow contracts, receivables and other forms of future income to support credit decisions beyond traditional collateral.
"An SME owner in Kumasi can receive payments in seconds through instant payment, but they may have to wait three months, maybe more, sometimes up to eight months or a year for a small working capital facility because a credit consideration is not built on the same digital footprint," she said, describing that transaction history as proof both of a business's capacity to receive payment and of its operation as a going concern.
She said the scale of Ghana's digital payment ecosystem provides a strong foundation for using transaction data this way. In June 2026 alone, mobile money platforms processed 954 million transactions worth about GH¢493 billion, with 84.6 million registered accounts, 26.4 million of them active, supported by more than one million agents.
Asante-Asiedu said the BoG is also advancing its e-cedi pilot, including work on cross border settlement and wholesale payments, as part of a broader push to deepen digital financial infrastructure. She said regulation would remain critical to the effort, pointing to the regulatory sandbox, the new Digital Credit Service Providers Directive and the Cybersecurity and Information Security Directive as measures designed to support innovation while protecting consumers and strengthening the resilience of the financial system.
