Mobile money as operating infrastructure: what GH₵4.54 trillion means for how organisations work

The default rail

In 2025, mobile money transactions in Ghana were worth GH₵4.54 trillion, 50.8% more than the GH₵3.01 trillion of 2024, across 9.70 billion transactions. Registered accounts reached 80.49 million, of which 26.66 million were active in any 90-day period, served by 491,060 active agents.¹

The growth has continued. In August 2026 alone, mobile money transactions were worth GH₵518.8 billion, against GH₵354.1 billion in August 2025, and the float held for customers reached GH₵39.8 billion.²

Account ownership is as striking as value. The World Bank's Global Findex survey found that 78.3% of Ghanaian adults had a mobile money account in 2024, against 40.0% across Sub-Saharan Africa.³ Only 38.7% had an account at a bank or similar institution.⁴ For most adults in Ghana, the financial account they use is a mobile money wallet.

This is not a Ghanaian curiosity. GSMA's 2026 industry report put global mobile money transactions at more than US$2.1 trillion in 2025, with Africa accounting for US$1.4 trillion, about two-thirds of the total, and West Africa US$498 billion.⁵ The Bank of Ghana's own report notes that Ghana ranked first of 90 countries in GSMA's Mobile Money Regulatory Index.¹

This article argues that organisations should now treat mobile money as operating infrastructure, in the way they treat electricity or the internet: something to design around, plan for and make resilient, rather than a payment option added at the end. It looks at what the numbers say about payments, payroll and services, at the risks that come with dependence on any single rail, and at what organisations should do.

From cash-in to commerce

The most telling change is not the total but its composition. In 2025, cash-in and cash-out together fell to 16.1% of mobile money value, from 20.1% a year earlier, which the Bank of Ghana reads as a gradual transition away from cash-intensive activity. Transfers mediated by third parties, including merchant and commercial payments, rose to 14.9% of value and 20.6% of transactions.¹

In other words, money increasingly stays digital. It arrives in a wallet, moves to another wallet, a bank account or a merchant, and is not withdrawn as notes along the way. Interoperability makes that possible: transfers between different providers' wallets and bank accounts through the national switch grew from GH₵30.41 billion in 2024 to GH₵51.60 billion in 2025, which the switch operator partly attributes to the repeal of the electronic transfer levy.⁶ That levy, which had taxed transfers at 1% since 2023, was repealed with effect from 2 April 2025.⁷

The same pattern appears in consumers' own reports. In 2024, 80.4% of Ghanaian adults made or received a digital payment, up from 65.6% in 2021, and the share paying utility bills in cash alone fell from 36.8% to 22.0%.⁴ Across the industry, GSMA found merchant payments to be the fastest-growing use of mobile money in 2025, up 42% to US$155 billion and overtaking bulk disbursements.⁵

Cash is not disappearing. The Bank of Ghana spent GH₵277 million printing and minting currency in 2025, and currency in circulation still grew by about 17%, to GH₵83.8 billion.⁸ But for a growing share of transactions, the question is no longer whether a customer can pay digitally. It is whether the organisation is set up to receive, reconcile and account for it.

What it means for taking payments

Many organisations accept mobile money informally: a staff member's personal number written on a card, a screenshot sent as proof, a reconciliation done by eye at the end of the week. Each of those habits carries risk. Personal numbers blur business and personal money. Screenshots can be faked. Manual reconciliation misses payments and invites disputes.

Treating mobile money as infrastructure means receiving it as formally as a bank transfer:

• A business account, not a person's wallet. Payments should land in an account the organisation owns, with more than one authorised person and a statement that finance can read.
• A reference on every payment. Invoices, bookings and fees should carry a reference the payer includes, so that each payment matches the thing it pays for without a phone call.
• Payment requests and links, not numbers on a wall. A request that carries the amount and reference reduces errors and makes fraud harder than a number anyone can copy.
• Confirmation from the system, not the screenshot. Treat a payment as received only when the organisation's own account confirms it.

The national rails make this easier than it was. The instant interbank system carried GH₵711.98 billion in 2025, roughly double the year before.¹ A universal QR standard for payments has existed since 2020, though its use remains modest: 869,000 transactions in 2025.⁶⁹ For organisations, the opportunity is less about any single technology and more about building the habit of structured, referenced, reconciled digital payment.

What it means for payroll

Payroll is where the gap between how people bank and how organisations pay is widest.

The Findex data show how quickly wages have gone digital. In 2024, 79.8% of Ghanaian wage earners received their wages into an account, up from 51.6% in 2021; 15.6% of all adults received wages through a mobile phone, up from 6.0%; and the share of adults paid in cash only fell from 11.9% to 5.5%.⁴

Yet many payroll processes still assume a bank account. Bank-based bulk credits, typically used for salaries, pensions and business payments, carried GH₵138.8 billion in 2025,¹ about 3% of mobile money's value. For a casual worker, a cleaner, a security guard or a junior clerk who has a wallet but no bank account, a bank-only payroll means delay, a trip to cash a cheque, or a bank account opened only to receive a salary and empty it.

Paying wages to wallets is not only convenient for staff; it is cheaper and more controllable for employers. Research for the Better Than Cash Alliance found that factories in Jordan paying wages in cash could spend up to US$1,000 a month on handling it, and that moving to e-wallets cut administrative time by 70%.¹⁰ Statutory payments are following: Ghana's social security trust lets employers and self-employed members pay contributions by mobile money and has said it is integrating mobile money more widely into its services.¹¹

The practical steps are clear. Collect each employee's preferred payment destination, bank or wallet, at onboarding and verify it. Require a second approval before any payment destination changes, because a changed number is the oldest payroll fraud there is. And keep a record that ties each payment to a payslip, so that a dispute can be settled from the books, not from memory.

What it means for designing services

Mobile money also changes what customers expect from any service that involves money: school fees, clinic bills, rent, event tickets, subscriptions, donations, deposits on bookings.

Three design principles follow from the numbers.

Design for the phone people have. Only 53.5% of Ghanaian adults have a smartphone as their main phone.³ A service that works only in an app excludes nearly half of adults; one that works by payment request, USSD prompt or a simple web page on any phone reaches almost everyone.

Pay at the moment of commitment. When a deposit can be paid in seconds, there is no reason to hold a booking open for a promise. Services that take payment at the point of booking reduce no-shows and the administrative work of chasing them.

Keep the money where it belongs. Customers trust services more when they can see who they are paying. Funds should go to the organisation's own account, with clear receipts, rather than through an intermediary's account that the customer does not recognise.

The risks of dependence

Infrastructure that everyone relies on becomes a target and a single point of failure. Organisations should plan for both.

Fraud has followed the money. The Bank of Ghana's 2025 fraud report counted 24,124 fraud cases at payment service providers, up 54% from 15,673 in 2024, with GH₵37 million at risk.¹² Its payment systems report names SIM-swap fraud, impersonation and unauthorised account access as the main methods.¹ And 37.7% of Ghanaian adults told the Findex survey they had been asked for their mobile money PIN or password.⁴ The defence is partly technical and partly cultural: no one in an organisation should ever ask a customer for a PIN, and every change to payment details should be confirmed through a second channel.

Services go down. Even well-run systems need maintenance; in August 2025 MTN took all its mobile money services offline for six hours overnight for an upgrade.¹³ Unplanned disruptions happen too: the undersea cable cuts of March 2024 degraded connectivity across West Africa for weeks.¹⁴ Organisations that take payments should know what they will do when one provider or the network is unavailable: accept another provider's wallet, a bank transfer or, as a last resort, record the debt and settle later.

Prices and rules change. The repeal of the transfer levy lowered costs for everyone in 2025.⁷ In May 2026 the Bank of Ghana directed MTN's mobile money company to suspend a planned fee on wallet-to-bank transfers pending further consultation.¹⁵ That business was moved into a separately owned company from March 2026.¹⁶ None of this is cause for alarm, but it is a reason to read providers' notices, to avoid building a business model on a single provider's pricing and to keep the ability to switch.

What organisations should do now

1. Open a proper business collection account with each major provider your customers use, owned by the organisation and administered by at least two people.
2. Put a reference on everything you bill and reconcile automatically against it, daily.
3. Stop accepting screenshots as proof. Confirm every payment against your own account.
4. Offer wallet payroll. Ask every employee where they want to be paid, verify it, and require two approvals to change it.
5. Never ask for a PIN, and say so. Tell customers and staff, in writing, that your organisation will never ask for a PIN, password or one-time code.
6. Plan for a provider outage. Decide in advance which alternative you will accept and how staff will record payments taken while systems are down.
7. Watch fees and rules. Assign someone to read providers' and the Bank of Ghana's notices each month, and review the cost of each payment channel each quarter.
8. Design for any phone. Make sure every payment journey works without a smartphone.
9. Keep customer money in customer-facing accounts. Customers should recognise the name they are paying.
10. Think regionally. Cross-border payment links are maturing; the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System covered 28 countries by July 2026.¹⁷ Organisations that trade across borders should ask their banks how to use it.

Kenya shows where this leads. Safaricom's M-Pesa carried KSh 41.68 trillion in the year to March 2026 and counted 3.1 million merchants, 71% more than a year earlier.¹⁸ When a payment rail becomes infrastructure, the organisations that build on it deliberately, rather than tolerating it, are the ones that grow with it.