Without trust, digital finance is just technology – BoG Governor

The Governor of the Bank of Ghana (BoG), Dr Johnson Pandit Asiama, says trust is the most valuable and indispensable currency in the digital finance era, urging Africa’s financial community to make it a priority.  

He noted that no amount of innovation, interoperability, or digital infrastructure would deliver the continent’s financial transformation ambitions without deliberate and consistent efforts to build credibility, transparency, and confidence. 

Speaking during a fireside chat at the ACI World Congress in Accra, Governor Asiama called for coordinated commitment from regulators, market participants, and investors to build and sustain trust in the digital financial ecosystem. 

“Sustaining trust comes from a number of areas – from the perspective of the regulator, market participants, the innovators, and investors. For regulators, maintaining trust, maintaining credibility is really one thing we take seriously,” he said. 

For market participants, he called for fairness in products, transparency of pricing, integrity of transactions, and consistency of conduct to build trust that grew markets, deepened participation, and sustained viability of the digital finance ecosystems. 

Dr Asiama noted that for investors, trust was about confidence in how capital was deployed, a stable regulatory and institutional environment, and providing the patient investment that Africa’s financial market development required. 

He said the Bank of Ghana’s way of building multi-stakeholder trust included the introduction of regular and structured consultations among regulators, industry, and market participants. 

The Governor said cybersecurity was one of the most pressing dimensions of trust in the digital finance era, noting that a financial system was only as secure as its most vulnerable participant. 

He said Ghana was advancing a shared financial sector security framework that allowed the Central Bank to observe in real time the cyber exposure facing the entire industry and act proactively to address systemic vulnerabilities before they crystallised into crises. 

Dr Asiama expressed confidence about the direction of Africa’s financial markets, driven by a growing community of central banks, regulators, and market participants, emphasising the need for deepened integration. 

He described the ACI World Congress in Accra as a powerful expression of that collective momentum – a signal that the conversation about the future of global financial markets now required Africa to be at the centre of the design process. 

Dr Asiama reiterated that the ultimate measure of Africa’s digital finance transformation would not be the sophistication of its platforms, the speed of its payment rails, or the scale of its capital markets, but “trust from those who use, depend, and build their economic lives around them.” 

He said the level of trust must be earned through consistent conduct, transparent governance, and institutions that delivered on their promises, adding that “building it is the most important work that every participant in Africa’s financial ecosystem is called to do.”

He mentioned the Bank of Ghana’s new biennial forum as a way of bringing together central bank governors from across Africa to share experiences on innovation, regulation, and financial market development. 

المصدر: MyJoyOnline (GH)