Volume of registered internet banking customers drop by 4.8% in 2021 – BoG
Data from the Bank of Ghana has revealed that the number of registered internet banking customers declined by 4.8 percent to 970,435 in 2021, compared to 2020.
According to the Central bank’s 2021 Payment Systems Oversight Annual Report, registered mobile banking customers also decreased to 4.06 million in 2021, from 4.77 million in 2020.
Despite these decreases in the number of customers, the value of these transactions saw impressive increases in the year under review.
Internet banking transactions saw a significant increase in value by 132 percent to GHS56.24 billion while he value of mobile banking transactions was GHS26.11 billion in 2021 compared with GHS12.94 billion in 2020. This represents a growth of 102 percent.
The BoG report further noted that the number of ATMs deployed by banks as of the end of December 2021 was 2,278 representing an increase of 1.8 percent over the 2020 position.
The number of POS terminals deployed also went up by 20.5 percent to 12,643 in December 2021, from 10,489 at end-December 2020.
All the major payment streams (excluding cash) showed significant increases in both volume and value, with the exception of the Ghana Interbank Settlement (GIS) or Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) transactions, which recorded a decline in value by 21 percent, but with a marginal increase in volume of transactions by 4.4 percent.
The volume and value of e-zwich card transactions also declined by 25 percent and 12.4 percent respectively, over the 2020 position, while Gh-link transactions increased in both volume and value by 10.3 percent and 29.6
percent respectively, over the 2020 positions.
GhIPSS Instant Pay (GIP), a service which permits payments across financial institutions electronically from a customer’s bank account to a beneficiary bank account, increased significantly in both volume and value.
The number of mobile money accounts increased by 25.6 percent to 48.3 million at the end of December 2021, from 38.4 million at end-December 2020.
The number of cards issued by banks increased in 2021. Credit card issuance increased by 9.95 percent to 36,327, from 33,039 in 2020 while prepaid and debit cards increased by 45.47 percent to 834,584 and 2.56 percent to 4.94 million respectively.
Source: Ghana Business
