Ghana’s digital finance sector risks squandering its growth potential by chasing duplicative innovations instead of building the interconnected systems that drive real economic transformation, the Chief Executive Officer of Mobile Money Fintech Limited, Haruna Shaibu, has warned.
Speaking at the 3i Africa Summit 2026 in Accra on Thursday, Shaibu laid out a strategic case for what he called leapfrogging, a deliberate move beyond incremental progress toward exponential impact through interoperability and customer-focused design.
He cautioned that new technology adoption in Africa’s fintech space has often produced duplication rather than disruption, drawing a parallel with the early internet era when businesses flooded the same models and ultimately competed themselves into irrelevance. “The key question is whether we are growing incrementally or exponentially,” he said.
Using infrastructure as a framing device, Shaibu described digital finance ecosystems in terms of road networks and pipelines. His argument was straightforward: sustainable growth requires strong foundational “main arteries” linked to smaller feeder systems, not a proliferation of standalone platforms each trying to serve everyone independently. In his view, interoperable payment and mobile money systems are the plumbing of the digital economy, and they must be interconnected across markets to generate meaningful scale.
“You need big pipes connected to other big pipes, creating a universal ecosystem that allows seamless transactions across borders,” he told delegates.
He acknowledged that Ghana’s industry, working alongside the Bank of Ghana, has made real progress in foundational infrastructure. But he argued the next phase must prioritise scaling and integration over new construction, with innovation shifting toward the customer delivery layer rather than the infrastructure layer itself.
Shaibu also positioned data as the defining competitive asset in the next phase of fintech growth, pointing to its role in credit scoring, fraud prevention and customer experience. He described a shift already underway from rule-based fraud detection toward behavioural analytics, which allow firms to anticipate fraudulent activity rather than simply react to it. He flagged deepfake-related fraud as a specific emerging risk requiring careful management.
On regulation, he welcomed the Bank of Ghana’s open banking reforms, arguing that openness is a prerequisite for building scalable platforms, even if it comes with commercial trade-offs for individual players.
Shaibu closed with a call for the industry to reframe its ambition entirely, moving from a posture of building more innovations to one of connecting existing ones into a system that delivers scale, trust and broad economic value.
