Ghana’s Central bank considers raising the limit on mobile money transactions

According to the Head of Research at the Bank of Ghana, Phillip Abrado-Otoo the Central Bank is working on addressing the concerns from the mobile money organisations. He was speaking at the second MOMO@10 Stakeholder Forum.

The Electronic Money Issuer (EMI) guidelines issued by the BoG categorises customers e-money accounts into three groups which defined their maximum daily and monthly transaction limits.

Depending on which category a customer is placed in, the daily transaction limit ranges from GH¢300 to GH¢5,000, with the monthly maximum transaction also ranging from GH¢3,000 to GH¢50,000.

The guidelines also captured the daily and monthly transaction limits of mobile money merchants as they stipulated an aggregate limit on cash-out and outbound payments of GH¢10,000 per day and GH¢100,000 monthly.

MTN for example, allows non-wallet holders to transfer up to GHC200 per day while wallet holders are also not allowed to transfer or make payments that together exceed GH¢1,000 per day. Also, the balance on one’s wallet is not allowed to exceed GH¢10,000.

Phillip Abrado-Otoo, however, said the BoG has taken on board suggestions to increase the limit on daily transactions.

“The Bank of Ghana is cognizant of some of these issues. We have heard it all. We have taken it on board and we will send it across to the appropriate departments and they will look at all these issues and try to incorporate some of them into the policy framework that is currently being worked on.

There is a department which is the payment systems department, which has been set up to look at all these things and they are working together with stakeholders to come out with the appropriate policy framework to guide the sector.”