Credit unions urged to be innovative to remain in competition

The Chief Executive Officer of Digital Square Innovative Technology Solutions, Kwaku Akuamoah, has urged credit union companies to innovate in order to take advantage of the potentials that exist in the financial service sector to remain in competition.

He said credit unions in Ghana, today, find themselves in an extremely competitive landscape. Citing figures from the Bank of Ghana to supportive his point, he said there are currently 35 banks, 140 licensed RCBs, 24 finance houses, 270 MFIs and 37 S&Ls.

“It is interesting to note that all these institutions are literally going after nearly the same potential customers, and this could have an adverse impact on the liquidity and profitability of credit unions,” he said.

According to him, in spite of the proliferation of financial institutions in the country, there are still about 70 percent of Ghanaians who remained unbanked which credit unions can take advantage of.

This implies that there are still growth prospect in the financial industry, an opportunity that credit unions can take advantage on

It has become evidently clear that investing in bricks and mortar is no longer the way to go. Indeed, we have all witnessed for example, how disruptive mobile money has been and the exponential growth it has experienced over the past few years.

This has been possible because the mobile network operators were quick to innovate, by designing and deploying technology, which the traditional banks were initially skeptical about, he said this during the launch of the Credit Union Association digital platform known as CUANet in Accra.

Tushar Belwal, CEO of PayNet Systems, India said the CUANet platform is built around a digital service hub, which host each credit union as a tenant allowing each credit union to manage their own services, business rules and customer services on the platform.

Additionally, for the second phase of the project, CUANet will be integrated to multiple merchants, remittance houses, billers, and banks in Ghana. The service supports multi-channel access including Kiosk and ATMs, he said.

It also supports NFC and QR scan-pay transaction. Built on a PCI/DSS certified infrastructure, Master/Visa/Gh Link card services will be soon added to the service bouquet as optional transaction channel.

“The mobile banking platform which we have just launched is only the first phase of the CUANet project, and we are very excited about it because going forward, CUA’s mobile banking services are going to be at par with those offered by the big banks.

CUA has the vision of leveraging technology for social change, and I am pleased to say that CUANet is one big step in that direction,” Nana Kwesi Agyepong, Group CEO of CUA said.