Ghana’s central bank has already blocked a mobile money fee hike and is tracking rising fraud, evidence that regulators are grappling with risks one analyst says threaten financial stability.
The Bank of Ghana suspended a proposed 0.75 percent fee that Mobile Money Fintech Limited (MMFL) wanted to charge on wallet to bank transfers, blocking it in late May, days before it was due to take effect on June 1, pending further consultation with industry players. Separately, Ghana Bankers Association data for the first quarter of 2026 put mobile money fraud at 31.5 percent of all recorded fraud cases nationally.
The scale behind those numbers is considerable. MTN, Ghana’s dominant mobile network operator, controlled 81.29 percent of the country’s mobile data subscriptions as of February 2026, and its mobile money platform serves more than 19.3 million active users. Earlier this year, MTN formally spun the business into MMFL, a standalone fintech subsidiary, a restructuring the company has described as a step toward operating it independently.
Banking and financial analyst Dr. Richmond Atuahene argues that this scale and structure amount to a form of shadow banking operating largely outside the oversight applied to commercial banks. Mobile money operators are licensed only as payment service providers, he notes, yet they now manage billions of cedis in customer wallet balances and perform functions that increasingly resemble banking, even though the funds themselves sit in trust accounts held by partner banks.
He likens the resulting concentration to a spider’s web, or a single national power station supplying an entire country, arguing that a prolonged outage or financial distress at the dominant provider could ripple through banks, telecoms, merchants and consumers now tightly bound together by digital payments. That level of interconnection, he says, makes mobile money providers systemically important in a way that deserves regulatory treatment closer to what applies to major financial institutions, both because of the contagion risk a struggling provider could pose to partner banks and because growing balances sitting in mobile wallets rather than bank deposits could weaken the Bank of Ghana’s ability to manage money supply, credit and inflation through its usual tools.
Atuahene also points to unregulated digital lending apps that charge steep interest rates and mishandle personal data, the risk that fast, small value transfers could be used to disguise illicit funds, and pressure on bank deposits as more household savings move into mobile wallets rather than traditional accounts. He argues that mobile money operators face lighter capital, liquidity and supervisory requirements than banks despite carrying out similar functions, a gap he says invites regulatory arbitrage and should be narrowed.
Atuahene stresses his recommendations are not meant to slow the country’s digital finance growth. Rather, he argues that mobile money’s scale now makes it critical national financial infrastructure, and says stronger regulation, better cybersecurity and closer coordination between the Ministry of Finance, the Financial Stability Council, the Bank of Ghana, the National Communications Authority, the Cyber Security Authority and telecom operators are needed to protect the gains it has delivered for financial inclusion.
