Vice President Bawumia, Mansa Nettey and other dignitaries at the event
MANSA NETTEY, Chief Executive Officer of Standard Chartered Bank Ghana, has given thumbs up to Vice President Mahamudu Bawumia for championing Government’s efforts at digitalising Ghana’s economy.
Speaking at the official opening of this year’s Standard Chartered Digital Banking, Innovation & Fintech Festival recently in Accra, Ms. Nettey noted, “Let me specifically mention the strategic direction and leadership role the Vice President of Ghana, H.E. Dr. Bawumia has played in this digital revolution. I believe that even with our challenging circumstances as a country, the digital economy is a strong foundation on which we can build back stronger and better. “Your Excellency, Distinguished ladies and gentlemen, following from the overwhelming positive feedback and the impact we made last year, we decided to make this festival an annual event.”
The CEO continued that “The world over, digitalisation is not only re-defining how we do business but keeps evolving at supersonic speed. It’s important that we do not only keep up with the changing dynamic of client needs and innovation but build new business models underpinned by a structure that supports this digital era.”
According to her, “Africa’s unique challenges remain but also give us a great opportunity to develop fast paced solutions for the millions of its people. I believe that this era presents us with the greatest opportunity to leapfrog our development, drive change for our people, create jobs for our youth, initiate economic recovery and growth and bring hope to our people. It is time to curate digital innovative solutions that are peculiar to Africa, solutions that will work for Africa and propel us to another level. In line with this ambition, we have made additions to this year’s event to broaden the scale to cover Africa’s digital transformation and touch on the very important theme of gender and inclusiveness.”
This year’s festival explored opportunities that digital technology could use to unlock Africa’s economic growth and focus especially on regulations that protect and enhance digital trade. It also discussed the future of banking, money, and payment systems in solving the complex financial inclusion challenges on the continent.
In a session dedicated to women in technology, panelists also discussed the urgent need for women-owned businesses to tap into the enormous opportunities offered by technology adoption and explore investment opportunities to help female owned businesses scale further and faster.
A series of plenary sessions also explored the opportunities for co-creation, to embrace digitization, and the extent to which platforms and payment systems are currently creating adding value and helping industry players to be agile amid the disruption.
“We have curated an exciting innovation and lab crawl as well as a Fintech Exhibition with participating fintechs from Singapore, UK, Ghana and other Africa countries. Our connection hub and experience zones will also deliver “need based” paired business engagements and real future tech experiences respectively,” she added.
“It is only through our ability to partner and collaborate to compete that we will see the scaling up of meaningful digitalisation and financial inclusion in Ghana and Africa. A key milestone in Ghana has been the collaborative work between Ghana Association of Banks and the Ghana Interbank Payment and Settlement Systems (GhiPSS) which led to the roll out of the innovative industry wallet called Ghana Pay. There are several other collaborations that have spawned significant initiatives and innovations.”