A microfinance monitoring visit one day took me to Bawku in the Northern Region of Ghana, where we visited microfinance groups which had benefited from microfinance loans from one rural bank. The groups were mainly women who were involved in various economic activities. I remember the excitement on the faces of women who had been …
Managing Director of the Agriculture Development Bank (ADB), Dr. John Kofi Mensah, has said that banks are working together to close the wide gap that exists between policy and lending rates. Currently, the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) of the Bank of Ghana has pegged the policy rate at 13.5 percent, whereas, average lending rate of …
Countries the world over are challenged to do more in revitalising their economies as a way in which to bounce back after the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. For this reason, the Ministry of Information (MOI) and the Ghana Investment Promotion Centre (GIPC) through an investment event called the ‘Spark Up Investment Summit’ are looking …
Fidelity Bank has launched a digital self-onboarding solution for its innovative Smart Account, a minimum-effort ‘Know Your Customer’ (KYC) requirement account that was launched in 2014 to extend financial services to the unbanked and underbanked in Ghana. The new platform has made it easy to open a Fidelity Smart Account from any location using the …
The Bank of Ghana’s 2020 Banks & SDIs Fraud Report says the reported value of fraud for 2020 was GH₵1.0billion as compared to GH₵115.51billion recorded in 2019, and the central bank notes that this poses reputational risks to some banks. It is noteworthy that despite the increasing rate of fraud cases-valued at GH₵1.0billion, the losses …
A survey of bank charges by the Bank of Ghana conducted in the first quarter of 2021 has revealed that majority of the 23 banks operating in the country do not charge customers’ fees for withdrawing cash from an Automated Teller Machine (ATM). However, almost all of them charge fees for issuance and maintenance of …
The Bank of Ghana in its latest inflation outlook has confidently forecasted headline inflation to remain within the medium-term target band of 8±2 percent despite it inching up in the past two months, but has expressed concern about risk from the fiscal side. Domestic price pressures moderated during the second quarter of 2021, causing headline …
The latest payments platforms report released by the Bank of Ghana, covering the first half of 2021 has disclosed that mobile money transactions has retained its place as the most preferred mode of transferring money, ahead of cheques. Indeed the gap between mobile money and cheques continues to grow, measured by both number of transactions …
A new campaign to get the Ghana Tax Exemptions Bill passed into law by Parliament has begun. The bill has been stuck between cabinet and Parliament since 2019 despite overwhelming support by its passage into law by economists, financial analysts, public policy commentators, civil society organizations and the media, in order to plug a glaring …
Analyst bemoans crowding out effect on private sector The country’s banking sector holds half of the country’s domestic debt – meaning the financial sector has become more comfortable investing in government instruments than lending to the private sector, a situation that a financial analyst says is a threat to the recovery plan. According to the …