Head of Research at IMANI Ghana, Patrick Stephenson has given details on claims that Vice President Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia has a total of 15M Ghanaians have bank accounts.
Speaking on 3FM’s Sunrise show Monday, August 17 monitored by My News Ghana, Patrick Stephenson reacting to the claims of the Vice President said that there was no truth in the claims.
He argued that the kind of services provided by the traditional banks are different from mobile money accounts and therefore mobile money accounts cannot be categorized as proper bank accounts.
He explained that “the subscribers to the service, what kind of service are available for them to use mobile money services for? I use mine for 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.
“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.”
