(How July’s National Conversation Put Financial Inclusion and Cybersecurity on the same table but left out the denominator in the equation.)
If July 2026 will be remembered for anything in Ghana’s digital economy discourse, it is this: the sector finally said out loud what everyone in the industry already knew. Ghana’s mobile money and digital payments boom has outrun the public’s confidence in it, and unless that gap is closed, the country’s cash-lite ambitions will stall. That was the throughline connecting two of the month’s most consequential media-led interventions — the JoyNews/Multimedia Group Digital Economy Forum on trust and fraud, and the Ecobank–JoyNews Business Financial Dialogue on financial inclusion. Different rooms, different speakers, one shared conclusion: trust is not a soft add-on to digital finance. It is the currency the entire system runs on. But currency is only useful for what it can buy, and neither conversation fully closed the loop on what all this trust-building and inclusion is actually in service of: more commerce, moving faster and more safely, within Ghana and across its borders.
The Trust Crisis, Named
On July 27, JoyNews and the Multimedia Group, in partnership with Hubtel, convened the inaugural Digital Economy Forum under a theme that did not mince words: “The Trust Crisis: Why Fraud is Holding Back Ghana’s Digital Economy.” The forum pulled together regulators, banks, fintechs, mobile money providers, cybersecurity experts, academics, agents and everyday users for what was billed as a documentary-led national dialogue on fraud and digital trust.
The numbers presented set the stakes. Ghana now has more than 80 million registered mobile money accounts, with over 26 million active every 90 days, and 2025 alone saw close to 10 billion digital financial transactions valued at over GH¢4.5 trillion. That scale of growth, participants warned, has opened a parallel growth track for fraud — impersonation scams, phishing, cloned websites and fake customer-service lines increasingly targeting ordinary users.
That warning was not hypothetical. Days earlier, the Bank of Ghana’s own 2025 Fraud Report had confirmed reported fraud cases across banks, specialised deposit-taking institutions and payment service providers jumped from 16,733 in 2024 to 24,778 in 2025 — a 48% increase. Tellingly, over 97% of those cases now sit within the payment service provider space, the fastest-growing and least-consolidated corner of the ecosystem. The BoG’s Head of Fintech and Innovation, Owureku Asare, put the underlying logic plainly at a related event: growth brings new risk, and confidence in the system depends on customers trusting that their money is safe and accessible.
The Forum’s communiqué translated that anxiety into a concrete agenda: onboard fintechs and dedicated electronic money issuers onto the FinSec Security Operations Centre, build a unified fintech and PSP association, strengthen real-time fraud-intelligence sharing across platforms, invest in public education, and upgrade frontline police training to handle digital fraud cases. The common thread across every recommendation was coordination — the sense that Ghana’s fragmented response to fraud, with each institution defending its own perimeter, is itself part of the trust problem.
Financial Inclusion, Reframed as a Trust Problem Too
A day later, on July 28, a different but connected conversation unfolded at the Ecobank Auditorium: the inaugural Ecobank–JoyNews Business Financial Dialogue. Where the Forum had interrogated fraud, this session interrogated access but arrived at the same destination.
Henry Ampong, Ecobank Ghana’s Executive Director of Corporate and Investment Banking, argued that digital innovation in Africa has moved past simply changing how banking is delivered; it is now redefining who gets to participate in the economy at all. He traced Ecobank’s inclusion push back to the early mobile-first Express Account, through to USSD banking and, more recently, an app now used actively by over 800,000 customers in Ghana, along with cardless e-token withdrawals and instant virtual cards for safer online transactions.
But Ampong was candid that the inclusion story is unfinished. Millions across Africa remain outside formal financial services, and he named affordability, digital literacy, trust and infrastructure as the persistent barriers with trust sitting right alongside the more familiar constraints of cost and connectivity. His prescription echoed the Forum’s: closing those gaps needs more than technology, it needs active collaboration between banks, regulators, telecoms and fintechs, and sustained public dialogue.
Two Forums, One Diagnosis
Read together, the two events tell a coherent story about where Ghana’s digital economy actually stands in mid-2026. The infrastructure for scale exists, tens of millions of mobile money accounts, trillions of cedis moving through digital rails, an expanding footprint of bank apps and agency networks. What is lagging is the connective tissue of trust: the assurance that a transaction will land where it’s meant to, that a customer-service call is genuinely from the provider, that a first-time user’s data and money are safe enough to justify leaving cash behind for good.
By putting fraud and inclusion on the agenda in the same month, under the same broad banner of “enhancing the digital economy,” the Multimedia Group and its partners effectively argued that these are not two separate policy tracks. A financial system cannot be considered inclusive if the newly onboarded are also the most exposed to fraud, and it cannot be considered secure if the response to fraud leaves the underserved locked out. Trust is the hinge connecting both.
The Missing Piece: Why Any of This Is Being Built at All
For all the depth of the two conversations, there is a frame that neither fully named, and it is arguably the one that gives everything else its purpose: none of this — the payment rails, the mobile money accounts, the security operations centres, the KYC and consumer-protection regimes is an end in itself. Every stakeholder in that room, from Hubtel to Ecobank to the mobile network operators to the Bank of Ghana, is in the business of providing enabling infrastructure. What it is meant to enable is commerce.
A mobile money account has no value sitting idle; it has value the moment a trader uses it to pay a supplier, a farmer uses it to receive payment for produce, or a small business uses it to accept a customer’s order online instead of losing that sale to cash constraints or distance. A secure digital payment corridor matters because it lets a market woman in Begoro transact with a buyer in Nkoranza, or eventually a buyer in Lagos or Abidjan, without either side having to physically move money or goods on trust alone. Financial inclusion and fraud prevention are not the destination, they are the precondition. The destination is trade: more of it, done faster, more cheaply, secured, and across more borders than a cash-based, paper-heavy system ever allowed.
This is not a semantic distinction. It changes what “success” should look like for the initiatives both events championed. A trust-recovery agenda measured only in fraud cases closed, or an inclusion agenda measured only in app downloads and account numbers, can technically succeed while missing the point — if none of that activity translates into more goods and services actually changing hands, more SMEs actually reaching new markets, more cross-border transactions actually settling smoothly under frameworks like the AfCFTA and its Protocol on Digital Trade. Digital infrastructure is not built because connectivity is inherently good; it is built because trade is the activity that turns connectivity into growth, jobs and revenue. That is the investment case regulators, banks and telecom operators are ultimately making to shareholders, to government, and to development partners and it is the case that should anchor how their commitments get evaluated going forward.
Put differently: Ghana does not need a trusted digital economy for its own sake. It needs a trusted digital economy because trust is what allows commerce to move at the speed and scale the country’s growth ambitions require. Every recommendation from the Digital Economy Forum i.e. shared fraud intelligence, a unified PSP association, better consumer protection and every inclusion metric Ecobank cited should ultimately be judged by one question: is it making it easier, cheaper and safer to buy, sell and trade in Ghana and across its borders? If the answer is no, the intervention has optimised for the wrong thing, however impressive it looks in isolation.
Policy Recommendations: Closing the Loop
If trust is the precondition and trade is the destination, then the missing piece from both July conversations is who takes responsibility for making sure the two stay connected — and with what instruments. A few recommendations follow directly from that gap.
1. The Ministry of Trade, Agribusiness and Industry should take the lead in convening the ecosystem, not just its trade mandate. The Digital Economy Forum and the Ecobank–JoyNews Dialogue each pulled together an impressive but partial set of actors — banks, fintechs, telecoms, regulators. What is still missing is a single institutional anchor with the mandate to keep commerce, not just payments security, at the centre of the conversation. MoTAI is well placed to play that role: rallying regulators (Bank of Ghana, National Communications Authority, Cyber Security Authority), private-sector value-chain actors (banks, PSPs, mobile network operators, e-commerce platforms) and development partners around a shared, trade-oriented digital economy agenda, rather than leaving each institution to run its own parallel initiative.
2. Harmonise and align resources instead of working in silos. Ghana is fighting a well-resourced, fast-adapting fraud problem with a fragmented set of institutional responses — a FinSec Security Operations Centre here, individual bank fraud units there, telecom-level controls elsewhere. Given how limited public and industry resources are relative to the scale of the threat, duplicating monitoring systems, data-sharing protocols and public-education campaigns across institutions is a cost the country cannot afford. A coordinated resourcing framework such as pooling data, budgets and technical capacity across regulators and industry associations would stretch those limited resources further than each actor optimising in isolation.
3. Fast-track a consumer protection bill with a strong digital consumer protection component. Ghana’s consumer protection architecture has not kept pace with the shift to digital-first commerce and finance. A bill that specifically addresses digital consumer protection — clear liability rules for fraud, mandatory disclosure standards, redress mechanisms for mobile money and e-commerce disputes would give the coordination recommended above a legal backbone rather than relying on voluntary industry cooperation alone.
4. Introduce a trust seal or similar certification instrument. A recognisable, regulator-backed “trust seal” for platforms, merchants and payment service providers that meet defined security and consumer-protection standards would give ordinary users a fast, visible way to distinguish legitimate actors from cloned websites and impersonation schemes, directly addressing the fraud typologies flagged at the Digital Economy Forum. Paired with public education, a trust seal turns an abstract regulatory standard into something a market trader or first-time digital user can actually recognise and rely on at the point of transaction.
These, among other measures, would translate the goodwill generated by July’s conversations into a system with clear ownership, pooled resources, legal teeth and a visible mark of trust the elements needed to keep the ecosystem oriented toward its real purpose: enabling more commerce, under a more secured condition and at a greater scale.
Intangible as it is, trust turned out to be the most measurable thing in the room all month. But trust is not what Ghana’s digital economy is ultimately for commerce is. Let us get that ordering right, with clear institutional leadership, pooled resources, and instruments like a digital consumer protection bill and a trust seal, and the investment in infrastructure, sensitization and digital literacy programs, security and inclusion follows a clear logic. Lose sight of it, and July’s conversations risk becoming a well-attended exercise in talking about trust for its own sake, rather than the foundation for the trade the country actually needs.
