ghananlpcommunity/ghana-gov-speeches-sentences huggingface dataset:
Through these reforms, we seek to strengthen institutions, improve business models, and expand opportunities for communities across Ghana.
Ladies and Gentlemen, The success of this journey has always been built on partnership.
The World Bank Group, the International Monetary Fund, the African Development Bank, GIZ, and many other development partners — have walked this journey with us; through financial support, technical assistance, institutional capacity building, and policy development.
Your contributions have been instrumental to the growth and transformation of this sector, and we look forward to an even stronger partnership in the years ahead.
To our Community Banking fraternity, the future before you is full of opportunity.
You have achieved much over the past fifty years.
Today, you have been entrusted with greater scope, greater opportunity, and a broader mandate.
And remember, “To whom much is given, much is expected.”
Go back to your communities and make them your own.
Support businesses.
Support farmers.
Support young entrepreneurs.
Let your impact be seen in the lives of the people you serve.
For our part, the Bank of Ghana remains fully committed to providing forward - looking regulation, and effective supervision to support your continued growth, resilience, and sustainability.
Finally, to all Ghanaians, these are your community institutions.
Know your Community Bank.
Support your Community Bank.
Help make it stronger.
Because strong Community Banks build stronger communitie s, and stronger communities build a stronger Ghana.
As we leave here today, let us remember that the next fifty years will not be defined simply by the institutions we inherit.
They will be defined by the institutions we strengthen , the partnerships we deepen, and the lives we transform.
So, may the next fifty years be even more impactful than the first.
And for the future we owe the next generation, and with gratitude, hope, and responsibility, I thank you and wish you safe travels.
Commemorating 50 Years of Rural Banking and the Conversion to Community Banking Keynote Address by Dr Johnson Pandit Asiama Governor, Bank of Ghana Bank Square | Thursday, 16 July 2026 Honourable Minister for Finance, Reverend Archbishop, Board Chairs and Chief Executive Officers, Leaders of the ARB Apex Bank, the Ghana Association of Banks, and the Association of Community Banks, Colleagues from the Bank of Ghana, Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen.
In 1976, in Nyakrom, in the Central Region, something happened in this country for the first time.
A community opened a bank.
Not a branch of somebody else’s bank.
Its own.
That is what we are here to mark.
Everything else, the fifty years, the 147 institutions, the eight million customers, grew out of that one decision, in one town, in the Central Region.
The idea behind it was almost too simple to be a policy.
Formal banking in this country had been built to serve a colonial administration and the merchants who traded with it.
Independence brought us our own commercial bank and our own central bank, and the 1960s brought development finance for agriculture, housing and industry.
Indeed, each was necessary.
But none of them reached the village.
A farmer could grow the crop that earned this country its foreign exchange and live a day’s journey from the nearest counter.
A trader could feed a whole town and be invisible to the financial system.
People saved.
People borrowed.
People built.
They simply did it without a bank, because there was no appropriate bank for them to do it with.
So, Ghana did something about it.
The Rural Banking Programme, a partnership between the Government of Ghana and the Bank of Ghana, did not propose to send a bank to those places.
It proposed that those places own one.
Bank of Ghana did not merely regulate that idea.
It championed it, and it put up the seed capital for many of the first institutions.
The vision found its leadership in the late Governor Amon Nikoi (and other key personalities such as Mr Emmanuel Asiedu-Mantey), whose commitment to community- based banking laid the foundations that every generation since has built on.
Within a year of the Nyakrom Rural Bank launch, three more banks were licensed, at Biriwa, Afosu and Asiama.
Ladies and Gentlemen, the idea worked.
The experiment yielded results.
Rural banks taught communities to bank.
They financed the farm, the season and the small business.
They held the savings that paid the school fees.
They kept a person’s money somewhere safe and near enough to walk to.
And when the Ghana Cocoa Board introduced the Akuafo Cheque Scheme in the 1980s, it was the Rural banks that made it possible for a cocoa farmer to hold a cheque and actually turn it into money.
The sector then built what it needed to sustain itself: the Association of Rural Banks in the early 1980s, and, in 2002, ARB Apex Bank, created with the Government, this Bank and our development partners, which did far more than provide operational support.
It connected these institutions to the national financial system.
What began with one bank at Nyakrom is today 147 licensed institutions, about a thousand branches, more than eight million customers, and an asset base of approximately GHS 26 billion as at May 2026.
It is one of the fastest-growing segments of our banking industry.
Note those numbers carefully.
They are not a measure of institutional success.
They are a verdict on the original idea.
And now let me say the thing that anniversaries sometimes avoid.
Not every institution built over these fifty years survived.
Not every one of them was well governed.
And when one failed, the loss was not recorded in a supervisory return and forgotten.
It was recorded in a community: in its savings, in its confidence, and in the faith it had placed in an institution carrying its own name.
That is not a blemish on this anniversary.
It is the reason for the reforms I am about to announce.
The idea was right.
The framework around it must now be strong enough to deserve it.
Honourable Minister, this began as a partnership between the Government of Ghana and th e Bank of Ghana.
It continues and will continue as one.
An institution can honour its history in two ways.
It can keep everything exactly as it was, or it can keep its purpose and change everything else.
We have chosen the latter and introduced a few key reforms.
First, the name.
Ghana has changed underneath the word “rural”.
Places classified as rural in 1976 are today towns, commercial centres, peri-urban economies with industries and ambitions of their own.
The word stopped describing them a long time ago.
It struggles now to speak to a young Ghanaian, to a new entrepreneur, or to an investor deciding where to place capital.
“Community” is the truer word, because it describes what these institutions are for rather than where they happen to sit.
It has been the truer word for some time.
Th e Bank of Ghana licensed the first Community Bank, La Community Bank, in 1987, and ten more since.
As far back as 1995, we began considering a transition of the whole sector.
Circumstances did not permit it then.
Today, three decades later, it happens.
The second reform, and this is the substantive one – the introduction of Urban Community Banking.
Fifty years ago, we established Rural Banks because many communities were too far from the formal banking system.
Today, the challenge is different: a person may live near a bank branch and still be unable to access the financial services they need.
Exclusion has not disappeared.
It has changed address.
Being near a bank is not the same as being served by one.
There are households in this city that can see a bank tower from the front door but have never had a loan from it.
Mobile money, fintech and digital services have widened access enormously, and we should say so.
But access is not the same as service.
And when national policy opens a financing window, or eases a pressure, or supports a sector, the benefit too often stop s at the doors of the largest institutions.
It should reach the trader, the artisan and the small business in every community.
So, we are creating the room for Community Banks to be established wherever they are needed, rural or urban.
Which is why you should not be surprised when you meet the East Legon Community Bank, the Cantonments Community Bank, or the Airport Hills Community Bank.
And before anyone asks, no, East Legon is not short of bank branches.
It is short of banks that will lend to the woman who trades there, the artisan who works there, and the young business that has just opened its doors there.
The third reform is the framework.
Let me be plain about what Bank of Ghana will and will not accept.
Community ownership cannot mean weaker governance.
Local knowledge is not a substitute for risk management.
And social purpose does not excuse financial indiscipline.
These institutions must be locally rooted but professionally managed, inclusive in purpose but prudent in operation, ambitious in reach but careful with other people’s money.
Their credit decisions remain their own, made commercially, by their own boards.
The Bank of Ghana’s part is to make certain the ground they stand on will hold.
And this matters beyond the communities themselves.
A financial system resting on a small number of large institutions is not a resilient one.
Depth is not only about size.
It is also about spread.
The reforms open the door wider as well: to broaden what these institutions offer, to compete, and, for the strongest among them, to grow in time into something national.
Existing banks are required to complete their statutory name changes, corporate rebranding, and other regulatory alignments by the end of December 2026.
The transition will be supported by appropriate prudential regulation and supervision, ensuring that the institutions live up to the new name.
To the Community Bankers in this room, today we honour what you have built over the past 50 years.
The responsibility now passes to you to prepare these institutions for the next 50 years.
The values that carried this sector for fifty years - trust, participation, accountability and local development, are the values that must carry it for the next fifty.
Everything else about your institutions is open to change.
Those four values are not.
They are what a depositor is relying on when she hands you money she cannot afford to lose.
Banking must reach people where they live, where they work, and where they build.
May the Good Lord continue to bless us all, and may He bless our homeland, Ghana.
Financial Architecture Summit 2026, National Banking College (NBC) Keynote Topic: Central Banking in an Era of Financial Disruption: Safeguarding Stability while Enabling Innovation Keynote Address by Dr Johnson Pandit Asiama Governor, Bank of Ghana La Palm Royal Beach Hotel, Accra | Wednesday, 15 July 2026 Esteemed Members of the Governing Council, Principal of the National Banking College, Chief Executive Officers and Leaders of Financial Institutions, Representatives of Regulatory Institutions, Captains of Industry, Ladies and Gentlemen.
It is my pleasure to join you at this inaugural Financial Architecture Summit 2026.
Let me commend the National Banking College and its partners, particularly Siko Financial Group, for convening it, and for creating a platform for serious dialogue on the future of Ghana’s financial system.
The financial system we regulate today is no longer defined only by banks, balance sheets and banking halls.
It is increasingly shaped by digital platforms, payment networks, technology providers and new forms of financial intermediation.
This changing arc hitecture creates enormous opportunities, but it also changes where risks arise and how quickly they can spread.
For central banks, the implication is clear.
We can no longer safeguard stability by looking only at individual institutions.
In a digital financial system, stability depends not only on the strength of institutions, but also on the strength of the connections between them.
In my remarks today, I will briefly touch on a few aspects of these.
I will first touch on the Changing f inancial landscape, and then I will speak on D igital Finance and the New Architecture of Financial Intermediation.
I will then outline the Evolving Role of the Bank of Ghana, and of course the Responsibility of Industry.
Then I will finish up with how we can build Human Capital for the Future.
Then I conclude.
A Changing Financial Landscape Around the world, rapid advances in technology, changing consumer expectations, new business models and increasing economic interconnectedness are redefining how financial services are designed, delivered, supervised and consumed.
The boundaries that once separated banks from technology companies, payment service providers, telecommunications firms and other financial intermediaries are becoming increasingly blurred.
Digital platforms now facilitate transactions in real time.
Artificial intelligence is transforming credit assessment and fraud detection.
Distributed ledger technologies are redefining approaches to payments and settlement.
Consumers increasingly expect f inancial services to be seamless, secure, personalised and available at the touch of a button.
What matters for regulators is not the novelty of these technologies alone, but the new dependencies they create across the financial system.
The challenge before us is therefore clear: how do we embrace innovation while preserving the confidence, stability and trust upon which every successful financial system depends?
The answer is not to choose between them.
It is to build the infrastructure, the regulation and the supervisory capacity that allow both to advance together.
Digital Finance and the New Architecture of Financial Intermediation Ladies and Gentlemen, that changing landscape is building a new architecture of financial intermediation.
For emerging and developing economies such as Ghana, that architecture presents a unique opportunity.
Technology has the potential to bridge longstanding gaps in financial access, reduce transaction costs, improve operational efficiency and support the growth of small and medium-sized enterprises, the backbone of our economy.
Ghana has made significant progress in this regard.
Over the past decade, our country has emerged as one of Africa’s leading digital finance ecosystems.
In April this year alone, Ghanaians moved 493.2 billion cedis through mobile money, across 967 million transactions.
Twenty-six million accounts were active, served by 534,000 active agents.
GhIPSS Instant Pay settled a further 79.0 billion cedis.
Point of sale terminals rose from just over sixteen thousand a year earlier to more than twenty -three thousand.
The rapid growth of mobile money, the interoperability of payment systems and the increasing adoption of digital financial services have transformed the way Ghanaians transact and interact with the financial system.
However, innovation also brings new challenges.
As financial services become increasingly digital, the nature of risk is also evolving.
Cybersecurity threats have become more sophisticated.
Digital fraud is growing in complexity.
Operational resilience is now as critical as financial resilience.
The increasing reliance on third -party technology providers, cloud infrastructure and artificial intelligence raises important questions about governance, accountability, data protection and systemic risk.
The rise of virtual assets, tokenised financial instruments and decentralised finance is further reshaping the financial landscape.
While these innovations hold considerable promise, they also pose significant regulatory, prudential and consumer protection challenges.
The Evolving Role of the Bank of Ghana Ladies and Gentlemen, a changing financial architecture requires a changing central bank.
The Bank of Ghana recognises that the erosion of the traditional boundaries of financial regulation calls for a corresponding shift in the way central banks approach regulation and supervision.
This means broadening our field of vision: from individual institutions to the networks that connect them; from traditional financial risks to operational, technological and cyber risks; and from responding only after innovation reaches the market to engaging with it earlier in its development.
That is not an aspiration.
It is already underway.
Our objective is not to regulate innovation out of existence.
Neither is it to permit innovation to outpace the safeguards necessary to preserve confidence in the financial system.
Rather, our approach is guided by a simple but important principle: innovation should flourish within a regulatory framework that promotes trust, protects consumers, preserves market integrity and safeguards financial stability.
The revised Cyber and Information Security Directive, which we launched in March, is the clearest expression of that shift.
This Bank no longer supervises only capital adequacy ratios and liquidity positions.
Under that Directive, we are safeguarding the confidentiality, integrity and availability of the data that powers our economy.
It places cyber risk expertise on your boards.
It sets the first comprehensive framework in our financial ecosystem for the governance of artificial intelligence in fraud detection, credit scoring and customer service.
It establishes clear rules for the adoption of cloud technology.
And its proportionality framework exists because we listened to the industry before we issued it, not afterwards.
Traditionally, supervision has focused on the soundness of individual institutions.
That remains essential.
But in an increasingly interconnected financial system, the stability of each institution also depends on the networks, technology providers, payment infrastructures and service relationships that connect it to others.
Our regulatory philosophy is therefore evolving from one that focuses primarily on institutional supervision to one that increasingly considers ecosystem resilience.
What that means in practice is this.
A bank may be financially sound and still be vulnerable to the failure of a shared technology provider, a payment network or a critical telecommunications service.
Supervision must therefore consider not only the condit ion of individual institutions, but also the dependencies that connect them.
This philosophy has shaped our work in three priority areas.
The priority is modernising the financial infrastructure.
Innovation cannot be sustained unless it rests on rails that are secure, interoperable and inclusive.
We are investing continuously in modernising Ghana’s national payment infrastructure, building a financial ecosystem that is secure, efficient, interoperable and inclusive.
A modern payment system is a critical national infrastructure that underpins commerce, investment and economic growth.
Open Banking addresses how financial data can be shared securely, with customer consent, to support competition, innovation and customer choice.
We have taken that project to an advanced stage.
We are continuing our work on the e -Cedi, Ghana’s digital currency, exploring its potential application to cross -border transactions and to wholesale payments within the domestic financial system, as a complement to the existing RTGS infrastructure.
Licence passporting addresses how regulated financial services can move more efficiently across borders.
We are following and supporting regional efforts in this direction, which would advance regional market integration and the broader vision of a connect ed African financial system.
The second priority is modernising the regulatory framework.
Infrastructure alone is not enough.
As new providers and business models emerge, the regulatory framework must provide both clarity and appropriate safeguards.
The objective is not to prescribe every future business model, but to establish clear principles on accountability, consumer protection, market integrity and risk.
That requires an approach which is proportionate, risk-based, forward-looking and adaptive.
We have prepared the Digital Banking Framework, together with comprehensive draft guidelines, and it is now ready for stakeholder consultation, to support its timely implementation and provide a clear regulatory foundation for the next phase of digital banking in Ghana.
And on virtual assets, Parliament passed the Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASP) Act, 2025 (Act 1154) in December last year, establishing a formal legal framework for the regulation of virtual asset activities in Ghana.
We are now developing, alongside the Securities and Exchange Commission, the licensing requirements and implementation guidelines that will operationalise it.
The third priority is strengthening supervisory resilience.
Our oversight must be capable of identifying risks that travel across institutions and infrastructures rather than remaining within a single balance sheet.
We have built our supervision on a risk basis, strengthened governance standards and improved data r eporting, and those remain essential.
But we are now giving closer attention to concentration risk, to shared service providers, and to the operational dependencies that can transmit disruption across the system.
The Financial Industry Command Security Operations Centre is where this is most visible.
Designated under the Cybersecurity Act, 2020 as the sectoral computer emergency response team for the entire financial industry, we are extending its coverage beyond the universal banks to savings and loans companies, microfinance institutions, fintechs and our partner regulators.
A financial ecosystem is only as strong as its weakest link, and a shield built around part of the sector is not a shield.
The Responsibility of Industry Ladies and Gentlemen, this responsibility does not rest with regulators alone.
It requires early engagement between regulators, financial institutions, technology providers and consumers, and it requires institutions themselves to carry their share of it.
For financial institutions, innovation should not simply be viewed as an opportunity to deploy new technologies.
It should be accompanied by investments in governance, cybersecurity, risk management, consumer protection, talent development and accountable leadership.
When technology advances faster than governance, opportunity can quickly become concentrated risk.
Boards and senior management must be able to explain not only what a new technology can do, but who remains accountable when it fails.
Building Human Capital for the Future Ladies and Gentlemen, every technological transformation is also a human and institutional transformation.
While technology is transforming finance at an unprecedented pace, it is ultimately people who will determine the success of our financial system.
No digital platform, however sophisticated, can substitute for sound judgment.
No algorithm can replace ethical leadership.
No technological innovation can compensate for weak governance.
The future of Ghana’s financial sector will therefore depend not only on investments in technology, but equally on investments in people.
We need leaders who can challenge models, understand their limitations and remain accountable for decisions made with technological support.
In this regard, the National Banking College has an important role to play.
As Ghana’s premier institution for banking and financial sector capacity development, the College is well positioned to equip current and future leaders for exactly that environment.
I commend it for that work.
Ladies and Gentlemen, as we look ahead, the Bank of Ghana will continue to support innovation that expands access, improves efficiency and strengthens competition, while remaining firmly anchored in our mandate of monetary and financial stability.
Conclusion Distinguished guests, the future of finance is not something that simply unfolds before us.
It is something we must consciously design.
It must serve the broader objective of improving the welfare and prosperity of the Ghanaian people.
The financial architecture of the future must be innovative enough to expand opportunity, but resilient enough to preserve trust.