The company operates as a payment processor for online vendors, auction sites and other commercial users, for which it charges a small fee in exchange for benefits such as one-click transactions and password memory.
Ghana has concluded discussions with renowned online payments system company, PayPal, and will, therefore, soon become one of the PayPal-compliant countries.
Paypal supports online money transfers and serves as an electronic alternative to traditional paper methods like cheques and money orders.
Ghana’s entry into the Paypal system is expected to be completed by the first half of 2020 and forms part of Government’s ongoing efforts to build a new and modern economy.
According to the roadmap presented by Paypal, by the second half of 2019, Ghanaian merchants should be able to receive payments for their goods sold online while by the first half of 2020, Ghanaian consumers should be able to make payments for goods and services purchased online via Paypal accounts.
It is expected to largely eliminate the difficulties associated with traditional banking services, such as the difficulty in opening bank accounts, the high costs associated with maintaining a bank account relative to customers’ income levels, the need to have basic literacy, administration and record keeping abilities and English-language capacity to operate a bank account, and the sheer intimidating nature of banking halls.
The Vice President, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, made these known at the launch of the first phase of the first Mobile Money Interoperability (MMI) Payments System in Accra on Thursday. The launch took place on the theme: “It’s finally possible”.
Dr Bawumia noted that about 60 per cent of the Ghanaian population was unbanked.
This high unbanked population, Dr Bawumia said, meant that so much money and savings were held outside the banking system, as a result of which, he said, there had been no access to payment instruments other than cash for transactions as most alternative payment instruments were bank-based.