Making a contribution on the subject ‘Envisaging the future of digital payments in Ghana’ during a panel discussion at the 2017 Ghana Economic Outlook and Business Strategy Conference, Mr. Carl Sackey explained that given the emergence of disruptive technologies, companies have to rethink new payment systems in a bid to speed up processes towards a digitised economy as envisioned by the government.

Data analytics is the process of examining data sets in order to draw conclusions about the information they contain, increasingly with the aid of specialised systems and software.

It enables one to analyse data from different perspectives and summarising it into useful information – information that can be used to help businesses increase revenues, improve operational efficiency, optimise marketing campaigns and customer service efforts, respond more quickly to emerging market trends and gain a competitive edge over rivals.

Mr. Sackey stated that the proper leveraging on data analytics offered a huge opportunity to bridge the revenue gap.

‘GCNet is well placed and positioned to lead the way with its infrastructure to track payments and electronic transactions having built various trade related data that could be used for business intelligence for growth,” he said.

He noted that in India for instance, disruptive technologies was changing the face of payment systems and speeding up the processes of digitisation of payments.

He said although, data mining was a relatively new term, the technology was not and continuous innovation in technology was opening up the potential for data analytics to attract the due attention from businesses and governments to enhance their operations and improve revenue.

Other panellists included the Chief Executive Officer of Margins Group of Companies, Mr. Moses Baiden and General Manager of MTN Mobile Money Limited, Mr. Eli Hini who agreed with Mr. Sackey that there was the need to fix a fundamental challenge to a digitised economy in Ghana which is the identification of all users of electronic payments channels.

The Ghana Economic Outlook and Business Strategy Conference (EOBS) is a day’s event that brings together leading government officials, banking executives, heads of mobile telecommunication companies, policy and decision makers, industrial experts, civil society organisations, foreign businesses and investors, and the diplomatic community, among others, to address issues pertaining to business growth and development.

By Times Reporter