The Ghana Association of Savings and Loans Companies (GHASALC) is developing a shared instant payment platform with two partner bodies, the Ghana Microfinance Institutions Network (GHAMFIN) and the Credit Union Association (CUA), aiming to give non-bank lenders the kind of real-time payment rails that mobile money operators and commercial banks already have.
The project, formally called the GHASALC-GHAMFIN-CUA Inclusive Instant Payment System, or GIIPS, is being run under the supervision of the Bank of Ghana and coordinated by the Institute for Inclusive Digital Africa (IIDiA), a nonprofit that has helped build similar systems elsewhere on the continent.
IIDiA had issued a call for proposals seeking a system integrator to build the platform, a step indicating the project is still in its procurement phase rather than close to launch.
What the platform will actually do
According to the tender documents, GIIPS is designed as a shared, not-for-profit payment switch — infrastructure that lets member institutions move money between each other’s customers instantly, rather than routing every transaction through commercial banks or mobile money operators.
The switch will run on Mojaloop, an open-source payment platform originally developed with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and already deployed in countries including The Gambia. It will be paired with Tazama, an open-source, real-time fraud-monitoring system built to plug into Mojaloop-based switches.
Together, the two are meant to give smaller lenders infrastructure comparable to what larger banks run in-house, without each institution having to build it alone.
The intended users are savings and loans companies, microfinance institutions and credit unions — a segment of Ghana’s financial sector that serves customers often excluded from traditional banking, but that has historically lacked the technical infrastructure to offer instant transfers on its own.
Filling a gap mobile money already occupies
Ghana’s instant payments landscape is already crowded. GhIPSS, a Bank of Ghana subsidiary, has run an interbank instant transfer service since 2015, and mobile money — dominated by MTN’s MoMo — has become the default digital payment rail for millions of Ghanaians without bank accounts.
Ghana Interbank Payment and Settlement Systems Limited also operates e-zwich, a biometric smart-card payment system aimed at the unbanked.
GIIPS enters that landscape from a different angle. Rather than competing head-on with mobile money for retail volume, it’s built specifically for the savings and loans, microfinance and credit union sector — institutions that plug into existing rails as customers rather than owners of the infrastructure.
A shared, sector-owned switch would let these smaller lenders offer instant transfers under their own name, potentially reducing their dependence on mobile money operators and commercial banks to move money for their customers.
That framing matters for financial inclusion in Ghana specifically. Research on the sector has noted that savings and loans companies, credit unions and microfinance institutions historically emerged precisely because commercial banking excluded large parts of the population — and mobile money’s rise has raised open questions about whether it reinforces or erodes that role. A shared instant payment system controlled by the sector itself is one way these institutions could stay relevant as mobile money scales.
What hasn’t been disclosed
The announcement leaves several material questions unanswered. There’s no public timeline for when GIIPS will go live, no disclosed budget or funding source for the buildout, and no confirmation of who is financing the system integrator selection process — IIDiA’s past projects, including the Gambia deployment, have drawn on donor funding, but it’s not stated whether the same applies here.
Until the system integrator is selected and a rollout timeline is set, GIIPS remains a procurement exercise rather than a live payment platform. Whether it narrows the gap between Ghana’s mobile money giants and its smaller, mission-driven lenders will depend on details the announcement doesn’t yet provide.
