The Bank of Ghana (BoG) has been named the African Central Bank of the Year for 2019 by Central Banking Awards following impressive achievement in reforming the Ghanaian banking sector.
Among the achievements highlighted for the award include:
- Reforms on a poorly-managed banking sector
- 5-year strategy on improving growing digital payments and financial inclusion
- Policy on environmental sustainability and social responsibility
- 2020 plans for a fintech regulatory sandbox
- Management of the physical currency
- A tighter monetary policy
SEE ALSO: Bank of Ghana Considering Launching E-Cedi, Central Bank Digital Currency
According to the report:
The central bank’s five-year strategy for improving payments, published in 2019 and building on a previous plan, puts great emphasis on fostering the growth of electronic means of payments and increasing financial inclusion. One key aim is to broaden the type of institutions that can offer payment services. This kind of initiative has brought excellent results in other African countries, where the entry of telecoms companies to the payments market has vastly expanded access to banking services.
It further added:
The central bank wants to make it possible to use QR codes to carry out transactions. It also plans to have a regulatory sandbox in place for fintech companies by the end of 2020. In October 2018, the central bank created a cyber security centre to aid the banking sector in dealing with this evolving risk.
Congratulations to Bank of Ghana – winner of the Central Bank of the Year Award at the @CentralBanking_ Awards 2020 #CBawards @thebankofghanahttps://t.co/5RW0wV40IA pic.twitter.com/Cw3dZt2yVN
— CentralBanking.com (@CentralBanking_) February 4, 2020
Recently, the Bank of Ghana (BoG) said that it was considering the release of the digital version of the national currency, e-Cedi.
The coming regulatory fintech sandbox is likely to include some crypto startups in Ghana as the fintech community has been lobbying for this to happen for a while now.
In 2019, Digital and Virtual Currencies Operations in Ghana – Bank of Ghana saying it was investing a lot of resources to further enhance the payments and settlements system, including digital forms
of money.
Part of the statement read:
While the Bank of Ghana acknowledges the enormous potential in the blockchain technology and how that can significantly transform the payments system landscape and promote financial inclusion, we are assessing with stakeholders and other international partners how the subsequent use of the blockchain technology into digital currencies
would fit into the global financial and payments architecture.
A revised Payments System Act referred to as Payment Systems and Services Bill is already under consideration by the Parliament in Ghana.
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