COVID19 is driving mobile money use among businesses in Ghana
According to McKinsey, consumers worldwide have been increasingly using digital channels, products, and services due to the pandemic. You can expect merchants to meet customers along these channels.
Interestingly, the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) surveyed firms to understand how they responded to the pandemic (business confidence, jobs, digital solutions being used etc).
The section on digital solutions caught my attention because it provides a sense of the extent to which businesses (small, medium & large) have adopted mobile payments to meet customers along these channels whiles maintaining social distancing.
Their research shows that in every 3 firms, 1 of them uses or increased their use of mobile money (37.5% of all firms surveyed). It's more likely in the Agric sector compared to other sectors like Accommodation.
This also shows how timely the Bank of Ghana (BoG) launching the Universal QR Code may prove to be. It allows merchants to easily accept payments from any payment channels people want to pay through. On the customer side, Telcos removed fees for mobile money transactions below GHS100 to increase adoption whiles banks also pushed their digital solutions.
It’s hard to know how adoption rates compare to the times before the pandemic started since a similar survey — that I'm aware of — wasn't done previously. It'll be interesting to know how all this looks like for the informal economy and how much of this will remains or changes moving forward.
Thanks for reading.
