Ghana’s small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) stand at the centre of the country’s economic transformation, yet one of the most persistent constraints on their growth remains access to affordable and appropriate finance.

The estimated US$4.8 billion SME financing gap is a stark reminder that Ghana’s progress in digital payments and financial technology has not yet translated into a sufficiently deep, data-driven and inclusive credit market.

The figure is not new. It has been cited in Ghana’s financial-sector discourse for several years, including by British International Investment (BII) when it launched Growth Investment Partners Ghana in 2023. More recent reporting has again highlighted the scale of the annual financing shortfall facing Ghanaian SMEs.

On August 3, 2026, the Bank of Ghana published a Draft Open Banking Directive for Regulated Financial Institutions, signalling a significant step towards a financial ecosystem in which customers can securely and, with their consent, share financial information with authorised third parties. This reform should move swiftly from consultation to implementation.

Open banking, complemented by a broader open-finance architecture, can help Ghana address one of the fundamental problems behind the SME credit challenge: the information gap between businesses that need finance and financial institutions that must assess risk before providing it. It is tempting to view the US$4.8 billion financing gap purely as a capital shortage. That would be incomplete.

Ghana has banks, savings and loans companies, microfinance institutions, fintechs, digital payment providers, development-finance institutions and capital-market institutions.

There are also credit guarantees and other interventions designed to encourage lending to SMEs. The deeper challenge is that many SMEs remain difficult to assess using conventional lending models.

A small business may have years of sales activity but limited audited financial statements. It may receive thousands of mobile-money and bank payments but have no conventional collateral. It may have a strong customer base and reliable cash flow but a limited formal credit history.

Another business may have substantial inventory or receivables but insufficient documentation to satisfy traditional underwriting requirements. Financial institutions understandably price uncertainty into lending decisions. When reliable information is limited, the perceived risk of lending rises. The result can be higher interest rates, shorter loan tenors, larger collateral requirements or outright rejection.

The World Bank has previously identified limited access to finance as a major constraint on Ghanaian firms, particularly SMEs, while noting that digital financing had shown promise but had not yet scaled sufficiently to overcome the barriers confronting MSMEs. This is where open banking becomes much more than a technology project.

Ghana has already built important foundations for digital finance. Mobile money, electronic payments and financial-technology innovation have expanded the volume and frequency of digital transactions. The policy question is now: How can this growing digital footprint become useful, consent-based financial intelligence for businesses and lenders? Under an effective open-banking regime, a customer can authorise regulated institutions and approved third-party providers to access specified financial information through secure application programming interfaces (APIs).

Instead of requiring an SME to manually assemble months of bank statements, payment records and other documents, an authorised lender could subject to customer consent and applicable rules, access verified financial information in a standardised and secure manner. That could fundamentally improve SME credit assessment.

A lender could potentially evaluate transaction patterns, cash-flow consistency, account activity and other permitted financial information alongside traditional credit data. A fintech could develop alternative credit-scoring models. A bank could automate parts of its SME underwriting process. An SME could receive a lending decision based increasingly on its actual economic activity rather than simply on the assets it can pledge as collateral. The benefit would not be to eliminate risk. Rather, it would be to measure risk more intelligently.

Open banking should not be presented as a mechanism for indiscriminate lending. Its value lies in enabling better information, stronger competition, more efficient underwriting and potentially more tailored financial products.

The Bank of Ghana’s publication of the Draft Open Banking Directive is therefore timely. The draft framework is intended to facilitate the sharing of customer-consented financial data among regulated financial institutions and establishes an important foundation for a more connected financial ecosystem. It is also anchored in Ghana’s existing legal and regulatory architecture, including the Payment Systems and Services Act, the Data Protection Act and the Cybersecurity Act.

The Bank of Ghana’s broader policy direction is equally significant. Its 2025 Financial Stability Review highlighted the importance of promoting open banking and data-sharing frameworks, strengthening electronic KYC processes and safeguarding payment systems.

This indicates that open banking should not be treated as an isolated regulatory initiative. It should form part of a broader strategy for modernising Ghana’s financial infrastructure. The next step should therefore be implementation with urgency, clarity and strong coordination. While open banking is an essential starting point, Ghana should avoid designing a framework that stops at bank-account information.

The financing needs of SMEs extend across multiple parts of the financial ecosystem. Businesses interact with banks, payment platforms, mobile-money providers, insurers, investment platforms, pension providers and other financial-service institutions. An ambitious open-finance framework would allow appropriately regulated and consent-based access to a wider range of financial information across these ecosystems. This could create new possibilities for SME finance. For instance, a business with strong transaction records but limited collateral could receive a working-capital facility based on verified cash-flow information. A retailer with consistent digital sales could qualify for inventory finance. An exporter could potentially use verified transaction and trade information to support working-capital facilities. An SME with predictable receivables could access more sophisticated supply-chain or receivables financing.

The objective should be to move from a collateral-centric model towards a more diversified credit-assessment model, without abandoning prudent risk management. Financial data that customers generate should not become a permanent competitive advantage for one institution simply because that institution happens to hold the account.

With appropriate consent, security and consumer protections, data portability can enable SMEs to shop for better financial products. A business could authorise another lender or financial-service provider to assess its financial profile, potentially reducing the cost and friction involved in changing providers. This could encourage financial institutions to compete on price, speed, service quality and product innovation.

A business that is rejected by one lender should not necessarily be excluded from the entire financial system. Its verified financial history could enable another regulated provider to make a different assessment. That is the promise of a more contestable financial market. But implementation must be responsible. The success of open banking and open finance will depend on consumers and businesses believing that their financial information is secure and that they remain in control of how it is used. Ghana must therefore build strong safeguards around consent, data minimisation, cybersecurity, authentication, liability, dispute resolution and third-party-provider oversight.

The Bank of Ghana’s recent emphasis on cybersecurity is particularly relevant. In 2026, the central bank introduced a revised Cyber and Information Security Directive aimed at strengthening resilience across Ghana’s increasingly digital financial ecosystem. Open finance will create more data connections. More connections can create more opportunities, but they can also create additional attack surfaces. The regulatory framework must therefore establish clear responsibility when something goes wrong.

Consumers should know who accessed their data, why it was accessed, what information was shared and for how long. They should be able to withdraw consent through simple mechanisms. Third-party providers must meet meaningful technical, governance and financial requirements. Cybersecurity obligations should be proportionate but uncompromising.

Open banking will be most powerful when it connects with other components of Ghana’s credit infrastructure. These include credit-reference systems, digital identity, electronic KYC, collateral registries, business-registration data, tax information where legally permissible, payments infrastructure and reliable financial records.

An SME should not have to repeatedly prove the same facts to different institutions. Where information can legally and securely be verified through interoperable systems, the cost of compliance and underwriting can fall for both the business and the lender. This is particularly important for smaller businesses, for whom administrative costs can be disproportionately high. Ghana should therefore consider the development of a coherent SME digital-credit infrastructure, with open banking serving as one of its central building blocks.

The Bank of Ghana’s recent request for expressions of interest for the design and feasibility study of a digital platform for MSME finance further reinforces the direction of travel towards more technology-enabled SME financing. Banks possess capital, regulatory experience, customer relationships and balance-sheet capacity.

Fintechs often bring technology, specialised data analytics, agile product development and new distribution models. Banks can use open-banking infrastructure to improve SME underwriting and develop new products. Fintechs can build analytical and customer-facing solutions on top of regulated infrastructure. Credit-reference agencies can improve data quality. Payment providers can contribute relevant transaction information within the boundaries of consent and regulation. Development-finance institutions can provide guarantees and risk-sharing mechanisms that help lenders expand into underserved segments. The result could be a more connected financing ecosystem rather than a fragmented one.

There is already evidence that risk-sharing can help expand SME lending in Ghana. In 2024, the International Finance Corporation announced a partnership with Access Bank Ghana involving a risk-sharing facility designed to increase lending to SMEs, including women-owned businesses and enterprises in sectors such as agriculture, health, education and green activities. Open finance can complement such interventions by improving the quality and availability of information used to originate and monitor credit. The country has sophisticated digital-payment infrastructure. It has a growing fintech ecosystem. It has regulatory institutions with experience overseeing digital financial services. It has a central bank actively developing an open-banking framework. It also has a pressing economic need to channel more productive finance to SMEs.

First, the Bank of Ghana should move expeditiously to finalise and implement the Open Banking Directive following stakeholder consultation.

Second, implementation should be supported by clear and interoperable technical standards, particularly around APIs, consent management, authentication and security.

Third, Ghana should establish a credible pathway from open banking to broader open finance, ensuring that the framework evolves with the financial ecosystem.

Fourth, SME lending should be a central use case. Regulatory implementation should explicitly encourage responsible innovation in cash-flow-based lending, supply-chain finance, invoice finance and other products capable of serving businesses without conventional collateral.

Fifth, consumer and business protection must remain central. Data portability without meaningful consent, security and accountability would undermine the very trust required for the system to succeed.

Finally, regulators, banks, fintechs, credit bureaus, payment providers, development-finance institutions and business associations should work together around measurable outcomes: lower underwriting costs, faster credit decisions, greater access for underserved SMEs, improved pricing transparency and stronger portfolio performance.

A US$4.8 billion financing gap is not merely a financial-sector statistic. It represents factories that cannot expand, traders who cannot increase inventory, farmers and agribusinesses unable to finance productive investment, technology companies unable to scale and entrepreneurs who may never create the jobs their ideas could support. Closing the gap will require capital. But it will also require better information, better infrastructure and better policy. Open banking and open finance cannot solve Ghana’s SME financing challenge on their own. Macroeconomic stability, interest rates, credit risk, collateral systems, business formalisation, financial literacy and long-term capital will continue to matter. But open finance can address a critical weakness at the heart of the system: the inability to efficiently convert the economic activity of many SMEs into credible, portable and consent-based financial information.

The publication of the Draft Open Banking Directive is an important milestone. The next milestone should be implementation. If Ghana can build an open, secure and interoperable financial-data ecosystem, the country can begin moving from a financial system in which too many SMEs are judged by what they lack, collateral, conventional statements or long credit histories, to one in which they can increasingly be assessed by what they demonstrate: real economic activity, credible cash flows and the capacity to grow. That is the kind of financial reform that can turn digitalisation into productive capital, and help close the financing gap that continues to constrain Ghana’s most important engine of broad-based private-sector growth.