Fact-Check: No Evidence To Back Bawumia’s 15M Bank Accounts Claim

Head of Research at IMANI Ghana, Patrick Stephenson has discredited Vice President Dr Mahamudu Bawumia’s claim that 15 million Ghanaians have bank accounts due to mobile money interoperability.

Dr Bawumia on Wednesday August 12 while addressing the youth wing of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) stated that many people did not understand what he mean by every Ghanaian will have a bank account.

He explained, “with the triangular feature which mobile money payments interoperability allows; that is the transfer of funds from mobile money accounts to bank accounts and vice versa, as well as from mobile or bank accounts to bio-metric payment card accounts (ezwich), it means that anyone with a mobile account has a bank account. They can make payments out of it and receive interest on their balances.”

“Many people did not and do not understand that we have moved away from the world of branch banking into branchless banking. You can have your bank account on your phone. You can do banking without visiting a bank branch or signing a cheque.

He added, “they were thinking about traditional bank accounts. Well, I can say without any fear of contradiction that as a result of mobile money interoperability over 15 million Ghanaians today (many of whom are unbanked in the traditional sense) have a bank account.

In verifying the claim, Mr Patrick Stephenson insisted there is little evidence to back the Vice President’s assertion.

Speaking on 3FM’s Sunrise show he said, “the subscribers to the service, what kind of service are available for them to use mobile money services for? I use mine just for top-ups because there are all these nice goodies that they give you if you buy airtime from the mobile money wallet…

“That is all that I use mine for and that is counted as a transaction, and, so the idea that somehow we lump all the transactions together and assume that somehow financial intermediations for people who ordinarily do not have access to bank accounts have gone up dramatically is very worrying because somebody is going to use a bank purely for the business of banking – deposit, withdrawals.”

He further affirmed that Dr Bawumia’s claim cannot be accurate considering how he merged 15 million people to mean 15 million bank accounts.

“But here he[Bawumia] has just limited it to ownership of bank accounts. The velocity of the transactions in the bank is a little over 68 or 98000 he talked about.

“So there is very little evidence to support the conclusion the vice president made. Very little evidence to suggest that 15million people mean that 15million bank accounts, it can’t be accurate. It can only point to a certain direction if we understand the transactions that are undertaken.”

Source: GhanaFeed.com