Mr Eli Hini, Chief Executive Officer of Mobile Money Limited, a subsidiary of MTN Ghana, has advised stakeholders in the digital financial ecosystem to allocate more resources towards customer education to eradicate mobile money fraud.
He said education would provide customers with the right knowledge and information to overcome the tricks deployed by mobile money fraudsters.
According to data from the cybercrime unit of the Ghana Police Service, over 300 mobile money fraud incidents were reported in 2019, with losses ranging from GHC70 to GHC4,000.
Speaking in an interview with the media on the sidelines of this year’s MTN MoMo Month Stakeholder Forum in Accra, Mr Hini charged stakeholders to do more to curtail the situation.
He noted that even though building a robust system was necessary in halting the trend, providing efficient education to customers was critical in eliminating the crime.
Mr Hini thus urged stakeholders to collaborate to eliminate the canker, and create a platform worthy of public trust.
“If we make fraud an MTN MoMo problem, then MTN MoMo is the only one who is looking at driving it… but everybody else is part of the ecosystem, and so we need to begin to look at it as an ecosystem issue,” he said.
“When it comes to customer education, you will notice that most of those conversations are not done together, and therefore individual investment cannot reach everybody. But if the industry was working together investing in customer education, together we will have bigger drive, bigger energy behind the customer engagement and the customer education that will bring the kind of customer adoption that we want.
“The education is important and we need to make it a continuous effort, you can’t stop at one and you say that is the end. Let me also say that by the time the customer is educated the system becomes robust. One, the customer understands himself and thus does not expose himself but if the system is robust and the customer is ignorant he will still leave is door open,” he stated.
The forum was held on the theme: “Digitising Payments in Ghana: A Collaborative Effort for Success.”
The MoMo Stakeholder Forum was introduced as part of activities to commemorate the annual MTN MoMo month calendar, and serves as a tool for advocacy on key issues in the mobile financial sector.
The MTN Mobile Money Month was instituted in 2012 to deepen awareness among Ghanaians on the MTN Mobile Money service.
Mr Hini assured Ghanaians of MTN’s commitment to promote a cash-lite society, adding that it was working to rope in the newly launched machine scannable code system, the GHQR, on its digital payment platform to accelerate the financial inclusion agenda.
Dr Ernest Addison, Governor of the Bank of Ghana (BoG), in a speech read on his behalf by Dr Settor Amediku, Director and Head of Payment System at BoG, reiterated the need for a strong stakeholder partnership to enhance digital payment service delivery.
He urged banks and non-banks to collaborate and intensify efforts on education campaigns and awareness-building on issues of payment fraud to spur behavioural change and build confidence in digital payments and services.
“We must steadily work towards eliminating the barriers that hinder effective collaboration among players and help achieve the cash-lite economy agenda,” he said.
Mansa Nettey, CEO of Standard Chartered Bank, urged the Central Bank and financial institutions to enhance regulation and strengthen fraud detection protocols to help maintain confidence in digital platforms and promote better financial inclusion.