Visa and leading banks bring mobile payments to Ghana

Visa, the world’s leader in digital payments, in partnership with leading Ghanaian banks, has announced the launch of Visa on mobile, its innovative mobile payment service in Ghana.

From today, the partnership commences with four Ghanaian banks who have either enabled Visa on mobile on their mobile banking applications and/or have acquired merchants to be able to accept the service. CAL Bank and Zenith Bank customers will access the service via their banking application. Ecobank customers have the USSD and banking application option while GTBank customers will access via USSD. Merchants aggregated through Expresspay will also accept Visa on mobile.

Visa on mobile is an easy and secure payments solution for Ghanaian customers. It allows customers to directly access funds in their bank accounts to pay merchants (person-to-merchant or P2M) or individuals (person-to-person or P2P). The payment goes straight from the consumer’s bank account into the merchant’s account and provides real-time notification to both parties at no cost. The introduction of this solution reduces cost and friction for accepting electronic payments as these mobile transactions are processed with the same scale, security and reliability as any other Visa transaction

Speaking at the launch, Oluwakemi Okusanya, Group Country Manager for Visa West Africa said, “Visa and its financial institution partners are providing the benefits of digital commerce to potentially everyone, everywhere across Ghana and the African continent, bringing more people into the formal financial system. More and more small and medium scale merchants come on board every day as they begin to understand the benefits that Visa on mobile brings, including real-time notifications of payments entering their bank account and access to sales and transactions history.”

Adoma Peprah, Country Manager for Visa Ghana said, “According to the Global Findex report, Ghana is among the most successful and fastest growing mobile money markets in Sub-Saharan Africa. In four years, mobile money penetration rose from 13 per cent to 39 per cent. The launch of Visa on mobile is significant to the expansion of an already vibrant mobile payment ecosystem as it is accepted at thousands of locations across the country, with plans to have more banks and merchants join the network over the next few months. We have communications campaigns lined up for the coming months to support our bank partners, merchants and educate customers on Visa on mobile at various locations across Ghana”

The Visa on mobile implementation in Ghana benefited from the Visa Developer Platform, which allowed all partner banks the ability to integrate the Visa on mobile APIs directly into their mobile banking apps. While rolling out a new solution with a bank typically can take a very long time from development to implementation and testing, utilizing the Visa Developer Platform interface reduced the time taken significantly. This helped to speed up the number of banks who have been able to roll out the Visa on mobile solution in Ghana.

Visa on mobile is now live in Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, India, Rwanda and Egypt with plans to launch in other African countries underway.