Makola Goes Cashless. Ghana’s Interoperability Experiment Rewrites How 30 Million People Pay.

Human Becoming

The Trader Who Stopped Asking

Afia sells printed fabrics at Makola Market in central Accra — the largest open-air market in Ghana, a labyrinth of corrugated-tin stalls and concrete arcades that processes an estimated GHS 2 billion ($150 million) in transactions annually. She has worked this stall for twelve years. She knows her customers by the patterns they prefer: Dutch wax for the Ashanti weddings, kente for the academics, ankara for the young professionals who have rediscovered African print as fashion statement rather than tradition. She is thirty-eight years old. She has three phones — one for personal calls, one for MTN Mobile Money, and one for Vodafone Cash. Until eighteen months ago, she needed all three.

The question she used to ask every customer who wanted to pay electronically was: “Which network?” It was not a neutral question. It determined whether a transaction could happen. If the customer was on MTN and Afia’s merchant account was on Vodafone, the payment would fail. The mobile money networks in Ghana operated as walled gardens: MTN talked to MTN, Vodafone talked to Vodafone, AirtelTigo talked to AirtelTigo. Cross-network transfers were either impossible or required routing through a bank account — a process that took 24 to 48 hours and defeated the purpose of instant mobile payment.

She does not ask anymore. Since the Ghana Interbank Payment and Settlement Systems (GhIPSS) completed the rollout of its mobile money interoperability platform, Afia accepts payment from any network. MTN sends to Vodafone. Vodafone sends to AirtelTigo. The transaction settles in real time. The friction that once fragmented Ghana’s mobile money ecosystem into incompatible silos has been removed — not by the telecom companies, who had no incentive to enable interoperability, but by the central bank, which mandated it.

When you ask Afia what changed, she holds up a single phone. “One phone. One number. Everybody pays.” She sold two of her old phones. The proceeds bought a bolt of premium Dutch wax that she sold at 40% margin. The interoperability platform did not make her rich. It made her simpler. And in a market where every cedi of working capital matters, simpler is money.

Structural Read

The Plumbing Nobody Sees

Ghana’s mobile money ecosystem processed approximately GHS 1.2 trillion ($90 billion) in transactions in 2025, surpassing the combined value of all cheque and card transactions in the country for the third consecutive year.^[1] Mobile money is not an alternative payment channel in Ghana. It is the payment infrastructure. In a country of 33 million people with approximately 60 million mobile money accounts (many Ghanaians hold accounts on multiple networks), the mobile money wallet has replaced the bank account as the primary financial instrument for the majority of the population.^[2]

The interoperability platform that made this possible is GhIPSS — the Ghana Interbank Payment and Settlement Systems, a subsidiary of the Bank of Ghana (the central bank) that operates the real-time gross settlement system, the automated clearing house, and, since 2018, the mobile money interoperability switch.^[3] The switch connects all licensed mobile money operators, all banks, and all fintech payment providers to a single clearing infrastructure. When a customer on MTN Mobile Money pays a merchant on Vodafone Cash, the transaction routes through the GhIPSS switch, clears in real time, and settles between the two operators’ settlement accounts at the Bank of Ghana. The customer and the merchant do not know this is happening. They see only that the payment works.

The Bank of Ghana’s role is the structural signal. In most African mobile money markets, interoperability has been left to the telecom companies — with predictable results. In Kenya, Safaricom’s M-Pesa dominance allowed the company to delay interoperability for over a decade, protecting its market position at the expense of consumer choice and market efficiency. In Nigeria, interoperability between mobile money providers remains incomplete. Ghana took a different approach: the central bank built the infrastructure, mandated participation, and operates the switch as public utility. The telecom companies did not volunteer interoperability. It was imposed on them — and the market effects have been dramatic.^[4]

The most significant market effect is the emergence of a competitive payment layer on top of the interoperable infrastructure. Hubtel and ExpressPay — two Ghanaian fintech companies — have built QR-code payment systems that work across all mobile money networks, enabling small vendors (market traders, street food sellers, taxi drivers) to accept digital payment without merchant terminals, without bank accounts, and without network-specific hardware.^[5] A printed QR code taped to a market stall functions as a universal payment terminal. The customer scans it with any mobile money app on any network, and the payment routes through GhIPSS to the merchant’s wallet. The cost of entry for a merchant is zero: the QR code is free, the merchant account is free, and the transaction fees are borne by the platform, not the seller.

Pattern Confirmation

The Cross-Border Signal

The pattern that confirms Ghana’s interoperability experiment as a regional signal rather than a domestic success story is the emergence of cross-border mobile money corridors between Ghana and Nigeria. The two countries share the largest bilateral trade relationship in West Africa. Ghanaian traders import Nigerian goods (petroleum products, processed foods, textiles). Nigerian traders import Ghanaian goods (cocoa derivatives, gold, aluminum). The informal trade corridor — goods moving across the border at Aflao-Lomé-Cotonou without formal customs processing — is estimated to exceed $3 billion annually.^[6]

Both countries now have mobile money ecosystems processing tens of billions of dollars annually. Neither country’s mobile money system talks to the other’s. A Nigerian trader in Accra cannot send mobile money to a supplier in Lagos without converting to cash, depositing in a bank, initiating a wire transfer, and waiting 24 to 72 hours. The friction is enormous. It is also the exact problem that interoperability solved domestically in Ghana.

GhIPSS and the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS) have been in discussions since 2024 to establish a cross-border mobile money clearing mechanism. The technical architecture is straightforward: a bilateral settlement switch that connects GhIPSS to NIBSS, enabling real-time mobile money transfers between Ghanaian and Nigerian wallets.^[7] The regulatory architecture is complex: it requires harmonized KYC (Know Your Customer) standards, agreed exchange-rate mechanisms, anti-money-laundering protocols, and bilateral settlement agreements between the Bank of Ghana and the Central Bank of Nigeria.

If this corridor materializes, it would be the first real-time, mobile-money-based cross-border payment system in Africa operating at scale. The implications extend beyond Ghana-Nigeria: the same architecture could connect Ghana to Côte d’Ivoire (the second-largest economy in Francophone West Africa), to Senegal, and eventually to the entire ECOWAS region. The domestic interoperability platform that GhIPSS built is, structurally, the foundation for a regional payment infrastructure that could process the $30 billion in annual intra-West African trade that currently moves through slow, expensive banking channels or informal cash networks.^[8]

Alternative Explanations

The most common counterargument is that Ghana’s interoperability success is attributable to its small market size rather than its institutional design. Ghana has three major mobile money operators; Kenya has one dominant player (Safaricom) and Nigeria has dozens of smaller ones. Building interoperability across three operators is an order of magnitude simpler than building it across Nigeria’s fragmented landscape. This is partially valid: scale matters. But the institutional design — central bank as infrastructure operator, mandatory participation, settlement through the national clearing system — is the variable that distinguishes Ghana from markets of comparable size that have not achieved interoperability.

What is not known: The actual impact of interoperability on financial inclusion metrics. Ghana’s financial inclusion rate has risen from 58% to approximately 68% since interoperability was fully deployed, but attributing the increase specifically to interoperability versus other factors (agent network growth, fintech expansion, pandemic-driven digitization) is not methodologically clean.

What would change the signal: If the Ghana-Nigeria cross-border corridor fails to materialize — if regulatory disagreements, exchange-rate volatility, or political friction prevent bilateral settlement — the signal remains domestic. If a security breach or system failure in the GhIPSS switch disrupts mobile money transactions nationally, the institutional-trust argument weakens. Monitor both quarterly.

Monitoring indicators: Track GhIPSS mobile money interoperability transaction volumes quarterly. Monitor Ghana-Nigeria bilateral settlement negotiations for progress. Track Hubtel and ExpressPay merchant QR-code adoption rates. Monitor Bank of Ghana financial inclusion surveys annually. Watch for ECOWAS-level discussions on regional payment interoperability.