Total Mobile Money transactions in 2022 hit a record ¢1.07 trillion despite the existence of the Electronic Transaction Levy (E-Levy), the January 2022 Summary of Economic and Financial Data by the Bank of Ghana has revealed.
This is compared with about ¢902.5 billion recorded in 2022.
According to the data, the biggest transactions occurred in December 2022 and November 2022, whereby ¢122 billion and ¢117 billion respectively were recorded.
There were fears that the implementation of the E-Levy in May 2022 was going to affect Mobile Money transactions, but that has not been the case.
From the data, Mobile Money transactions have been surging since the implementation of E-levy in May 2022.
It went up to ¢77.4 billion in June 2022, from ¢71.4 billion in May 2022, but stood at ¢77.2 billion in July 2022.
It reached a significant ¢100.2 billion in October 2022, about ¢11.4 billion increase.
A recent survey by the Center for Economics Finance and Inequality Studies revealed that many consumers do not pay E-Levy despite undertaking mobile money transactions.
This is because they reach a gentleman’s agreement” with the vendors to enable them to deposit cash into the wallet of the receiver through a ‘Mobile Money’ merchant account.
In this case, the government will therefore have to listen to concerns by many and bring down the rate of the e-levy further to at least 0.5% in order to prevent consumers from avoiding payment of the levy, whilst raking in more revenue from levy.
Total Mobile Money transactions in 2021 and 2022
| MONTHS | 2021 (BILLIONS) | 2022 (BILLIONS) |
| January | 67.1 | 76.2 |
| February | 67.9 | 76.8 |
| March | 82.3 | 90.5 |
| April | 83.8 | 87.7 |
| May | 86.5 | 71.4 |
| June | 89.1 | 77.4 |
| July | 99.1 | 77.2 |
| August | 81.8 | 87.1 |
| September | 81.0 | 88.8 |
| October | 80.0 | 100.2 |
| November | 82.0 | 117.0 |
| December | 82.9 | 122.0 |
| Total | 902.5 | 1.072 trillion |