Mobile money disrupted banking in Ghana – Zeepay CEO
Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Zeepay, Andrew Takyi-Appiah, says the introduction of mobile money disrupted banking in Ghana and other parts of Africa.
He indicated that mobile money broke the “curse” of Ghanaians’ inability to walk into a bank to transfer money to another bank “over the counter”.
The CEO of Zeepay observed that banking has been made easier with the evolution of payment systems such as mobile money.
Speaking on the Point of View on Citi TV hosted by Bernard Avle, Mr. Takyi-Appiah, indicated that “in our case, the first disruption of mobile money happened with banking. Ten years ago, you couldn’t walk into a Ghana Commercial Bank and say “I want to send money to Ecobank” over the counter. The cashier would laugh at you, and she “would” probably call a security guard on you. Because she probably thinks you are about to rob the bank, it wasn’t possible. So mobile money in Ghana came to disrupt that process.
He added, “It was a “proper” classic use case disruption, we call it “off-net”, where you could go and send money to the other side even if the person doesn’t have a wallet but could receive it on his/her phone. The second wave of disruption with mobile money would happen with payments. And payments didn’t take off as rapidly as we hoped it to take off, then remittances came in to do the job. It’s easier to scale remittances.”
He remarked that Ghana is a critical market for mobile money transactions.
“If you talk about evolution, market trends, market players who will dominate, from the financial inclusion index, it is very clear that Ghana is a critical market. In the “King’s market” there are Ghana, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Kenya and South Africa,” he emphasized.
Source: Ghana Business
