Mobile money transfers throughout various networks, also called Mobile Money Interoperability (MMI), have actually shot up by 358 percent in the first 3 months of this year, compared to the very same period last year.
The volume of MOMO Interoperability increased to over 5.12 million deals from 1.11 million in the first quarter of 2015, according to figures from the Ghana Interbank Payment and Settlement Systems (GhIPSS), a subsidiary of the Bank of Ghana.
Sending out cash from one wallet to another of a various telecoms network was only possible through the token system, which was made complex until the MMI was introduced in Might 2018. Considering that its introduction, it has become easier to transfer funds throughout wallets of different networks. This possibility has also led many organizations to set up their systems to accept mobile money payments.
President of GhIPSS, Archie Hesse, stated in an interview with journalists said the MOMO Interoperability has made payments through mobile money one of the most efficient and simple to access.
He, for that reason, urged all services to accept payments from mobile money wallets as one of the default modes of payment or risk losing on potential earnings.
When MOMO Interoperability began, the volume of deals hovered around 100,000 monthly but regular monthly transactions have since crossed the one million mark with the month of March 2020 recording near to 2 million deals.
MOMO Interoperability deals include transfers from wallets to savings accounts along with wallets to e-zwich cards.
However, these two represent less than 3 percent of the volume of deals, suggesting that a frustrating bulk of the transactions involve wallet to wallet transfers.
Mobile cash, in general, has witnessed extraordinary success in Ghana but this is being negated by the regular cashback transactions, which implies that eventually the money is being utilized to make payments.
In current times, however, the introduction of merchant IDs has motivated customers to pay directly from their wallets.
Another effort likely to lead to an additional drop-in cashback transaction is the launch of the universal QR code for payment.
This payment service will make it possible for customers to scan the codes of merchants to pay straight from their wallets. The QR code payment is also readily available for feature phone users who will be required to call a particular code to result in payment.
Payment using QR code in Ghana can be made using mobile money wallets or bank accounts as well as any other payment apps that fintech may develop. This payment service was launched in March this year.
