MTN Ghana is paying a total of GH¢13.4 million in interests to over 6.2 million Mobile Money customers for the first two quarters of this year.
According to MTN, the first tranche of GH¢5.88 million was paid on 11th September, 2016, for interest earned during the first quarter of 2016, while GH¢7.16 million would be paid on 18th September 2016 as interest for the second quarter.
Interest distribution for the third and fourth quarters would be communicated in due course, it added.
However, some analysts have raised concerns as to why such payments are only starting this year.
The analysts have questioned what would become of interest payments that have accrued since MTN Ghana’s introduction of the first Mobile Money service to the Ghanaian market seven years ago in 2009.
“If for this year alone, the company can pay about GH¢27 million, then it presupposes that for the past six years the company would have mobilized huge monies from the Mobile Money services that went interest free,” a curious customer told this paper.
Initially, MTN Mobile Money offered a few services such as money transfer and airtime top-up, but four years after the launch of the MTN Mobile Money Month, the service was able to garner 4.8 million customers, 19, 500 Mobile Money merchants and 18.5 million transactions.
Currently, there are about 40,000 merchants nationwide.
The resolve to pay interest to its Mobile Money customers takes root from the Bank of Ghana (BoG)’s Dedicated Electronic Money Issuers (DEMI) Guidelines, which enjoins banks to pay interest on cash flow from the mobile money platforms to the telcos so that the telcos can pay out 80 percent of that interest to their mobile money customers.
In tandem with the afore-stated, the Central Bank recently approved interest levels of between 1.5 percent and 7 percent, but it was up to each telco to negotiate with each partner bank on what percentage of interest they preferred within the given range.
Until recently, the mobile money space was regulated by the Branchless Banking Guidelines, under which the licence was issued to banks to partner telcos for the service.
By the new guidelines, the license now goes to the telcos, with each telco expected to establish separate semi-autonomous companies to run their mobile money services.
By Samuel Boadi