The Missing Layer in Ghana's Financial System

Ghana's financial system works, and often impressively so. Payments move in real time. Mobile money has become second nature. Interoperability, once aspirational, is now routine. To many observers, this looks like a system that has arrived.

But systems do not fail because they are unused. They fail because they are unfinished.

Over the past decade, Ghana has done an admirable job regulating financial products: wallets, transfers, agent networks, lending models, and foreign-exchange channels. What it has not yet done, explicitly and comprehensively, is to articulate and govern the financial infrastructure architecture that binds these products into a resilient system. This missing layer is subtle, technical, and easy to overlook. But it is also where the greatest long-term risks quietly sit.

This is a story of success that has outpaced its doctrine.

Products are visible. Systems are not.

A financial product is what the customer experiences: sending money, paying a merchant, receiving a loan, exchanging currency. A financial system is what makes those actions reliable: identity verification, messaging standards, settlement finality, liquidity buffers, loss allocation, and dispute resolution across institutions.

In Ghana, and across much of Africa, we have understandably focused on the visible edges. We license institutions. We approve products. We supervise conduct. But we have often assumed that the underlying system will simply hold together.

That assumption works until scale, complexity, or stress exposes its limits.

A mature financial system is not merely a collection of licensed entities. It is a stack: layers of infrastructure that must align, or else innovation becomes fragility.

The financial infrastructure stack

At its core, a modern financial system rests on five interdependent layers.

1. Identity and trust: Who is transacting, under what verified identity, and with what degree of portability across institutions? When identity is fragmented or treated purely as a compliance hurdle, everything above it (credit, fraud prevention, consumer protection) becomes costlier and weaker.

2. Messaging and settlement: How do payment instructions move? What standards govern them? When is a transaction truly final? Many systems deliver instant customer experiences while settlement happens later in the background. That is not a flaw; it is a design choice. But it requires clarity. Ambiguity around finality only reveals itself when disputes or outages occur.

3. Liquidity: While value is moving, where does it actually sit? Who prefunds whom? What happens on a bad day, when volumes spike and liquidity tightens? Instant payments without explicit liquidity design create hidden leverage, and hidden leverage rarely stays hidden when conditions turn.

4. Risk and loss allocation: When something goes wrong (fraud, system failures, mistaken transfers), who pays, and under what rules? If a system cannot answer this predictably, trust becomes discretionary. And discretionary trust evaporates quickly.

5. Governance and dispute resolution: When problems cross institutions, who decides, who enforces, and how quickly are matters resolved? Informal coordination may work at small scale. It does not work at national scale.

Ghana has elements of all five layers. What it has not done is name them explicitly as one coherent system with clear ownership and doctrine.

GhIPSS: the strength we should recognise and finish

To be clear, Ghana is not operating in an institutional vacuum. The Ghana Interbank Payment and Settlement Systems (GhIPSS) is already a powerful central hub for interoperability and settlement. In many respects, GhIPSS is the physical embodiment of what a financial infrastructure doctrine looks like in practice: a neutral systems operator, governed by rules rather than commercial incentives, connecting banks and non-banks across common rails.

This is a significant national strength. Few countries on the continent have achieved this level of deliberate centralisation and interoperability. But infrastructure, on its own, is not the same as doctrine.

While GhIPSS anchors critical layers of the system (particularly messaging and settlement), the full stack has never been formally articulated in one place. Questions around identity portability, liquidity backstops, loss allocation across rails, and system-wide dispute resolution are often inferred rather than declared. They work in practice, but they are not yet governed as a single, visible architecture.

The task ahead is therefore not to invent new infrastructure. It is to complete the architecture Ghana has already begun.

This is not a Ghana-only problem

Across Africa, the same pattern repeats. The continent leads the world in mobile money adoption and digital payment growth. Yet it also experiences recurring disputes, fraud externalities, settlement tensions, and regulatory firefighting once systems grow large.

Some countries have taken instructive steps. South Africa has long treated payments as a governed national system, with explicit clearing arrangements and institutional roles. Nigeria's instant payment ecosystem clearly distinguishes scheme operation from central-bank settlement, even while delivering speed at scale. Kenya's regulatory framework explicitly frames interoperability as an architectural requirement rather than a courtesy.

None of these systems are perfect. But they share one crucial trait: they name the system. Vocabulary matters. Once layers and responsibilities are explicit, accountability becomes enforceable.

Africa's challenge is not innovation. It is institutionalisation.

Why this matters now

Ghana's financial system is becoming more complex each year. Transaction volumes are rising. Non-bank intermediaries play ever-larger roles. Cross-border flows are increasing. Public expectations are shifting toward always-on finance.

Complexity without doctrine is manageable only until stress arrives.

When the next serious shock comes (whether operational, financial, or geopolitical), the most important questions will not be about product licensing. They will be about system design:

• Who is responsible for final settlement when systems disagree?

• Where does liquidity pressure accumulate, and who absorbs it?

• How are losses allocated when failures cross platforms?

• How quickly can disputes be resolved across institutions, not just within them?

These questions determine whether confidence holds when conditions deteriorate.

From regulation to deliberate design

The answer is not more rules for their own sake. It is clearer system design.

1. Ghana should formally articulate its financial infrastructure stack. Not another high-level strategy, but a clear statement of the layers that exist, the principles governing them, and the institutions responsible for each.

2. Ownership must be explicit. Settlement finality, liquidity management, scheme governance, and dispute resolution cannot sit in grey zones. Ambiguity is not neutrality; it is deferred risk.

3. Liquidity engineering must be treated as public infrastructure. Instant experiences can coexist with deferred settlement, but only if the liquidity logic underneath is transparent, governed, and stress-tested.

4. Loss allocation must be predictable. Case-by-case improvisation is not policy. In a digital system, uncertainty spreads faster than failure itself.

5. Dispute resolution must operate at system speed. In a high-velocity environment, slow resolution becomes reputational contagion.

The quiet work that prevents loud crises

None of this is glamorous. It will not trend on social media. It does not lend itself to slogans. But it is precisely this quiet, technical work that separates systems that endure from systems that merely function.

Ghana has already achieved scale, adoption, and innovation. The next phase is more demanding and more consequential: moving from infrastructure to doctrine, from working rails to a fully articulated system.

Resilience cannot be inferred from uptime alone. It must be designed, layer by layer, before it is needed.

Financial systems rarely collapse because of one bad actor. They fail because no one was clearly responsible for the system itself.

Ghana has built the hub. The question now is whether we are ready to finish the architecture before the system is tested under conditions it was not explicitly designed to handle.