At the Joy FM Technology and Innovations Summit 2017, the tech savvy showed a long-held passion for short-cuts in almost everything - starting with grammar.

No time for Automated Clearing House when you could simply say ACH. Person to Person is too long. Why not just P2P?

Long words waste time, an app saves it, it appeared.

And so when CEO of Zeepay Mobile Financial Services, Andrew Takyi Appiah, took the stage, he made a case for how our lives could be made simple by a complex technology.

Loans need not sit in an account at the bank. Why not put it in a mobile money wallet. And while at that, why not add remittances, bills, savings account, insurance - everything.

He was not content that mobile money allows money to move without stepping into a banking hall.

Money that moves from mobile phone to mobile phone, is that one too mobile money? To Andrew Appiah, it was an emphatic no. He said what we call mobile money is better described as agent money because the cash just shifts around.

Real mobile money is a lot more transactional. The money does more than sitting around in a chip. It talks to several other chips - it pays bills and banks, it receives and doles out dollars in remittances.

Real mobile money is putting so much personal control in clients' hands.

 It is reducing brick-and-mortar banking halls into a fancy slab of glass, plastic and thin metal called a mobile phone.

And the CEO of the mobile financial services platform Zeepay, wants this done not in the shortest possible time. He wants it now.

"We need to do it now because if we don't do it now the market will move itself... and then we lose control", the visionary warned.

"We have the know-how; we have the technology".

All his colleagues want is policy direction - a meeting of oligarchs - a healthy mix of technocrats and politicians to say, 'on your marks, get set - go!

And in that swipe of the magic wand of public policy, 21 million Ghanaians who use mobile money wallets will have greater financial democracy.

It would mean new players in the techno-banking industry. Now it won't be just an association of say microfinance companies but also an association of mobile financial service providers like Zeepay.

This Mobile Financial service alliance will become some sort of a self-regulatory mechanism and define standards.

The messenger for new frontiers of banking said in Game of Thrones chracter Jon Snow's voice, a technological winter is coming. Coming to change in very profound ways how cash is handled.  

The Head of Payment Systems Department at the Bank of Ghana, Dr. Setor Amediku tried to ground the over-enthusiastic push for more mobile financial revolution.

The government has not been as cold-feet as it may have been suggested around the talking points.

He said on the matter of mobile financial services, comparing new entrant Ghana to old dog Kenya is unfair.

Ghana only began this mobile money financial services in July 2015 with the passage of the Electronic Money Issuers guidelines.

Then, it was just about 454million cedis floating on phones as cash. Now it is 1.8billion cedis.

"Look, as we are speaking now the government is using mobile payments to transfer LEAP beneficiaries in the rural areas.

Dr. Setor Amediku

"So there is a lot that has happened...We are not doing badly but there is a lot of space for improvement."

He said BoG has been responsive to new ideas. Like when Ecobank came with the plan to clear goods at the port using electronic payments.

"If you go to our ports people carry money in bags to go and clear goods and by international norms on your card, you are not supposed to hold more than $10,000.

"Ecobank came with an innovative product where there will be a card system which can never be used on any platform but you can use that card to clear good at the ports.

"It saved the government from people misusing money at the port. Government gets its money straight into the consolidated fund."

While there was talk around banks linking mobile money wallets to bank accounts, the BoG has already moved to make it happen.

"It is already happening...more than 10 banks have done that. We have given authorisation. This is a basic function now. Majority of the banks are no longer printing statements."

Dr. Setor was excited and proud of the leading role the central bank is playing in making mobile-based transactions common. The challenge is to push this down further to levels as common as using it to pay for taxi services. 

He revealed an interesting statistic. There are more than 107,000 mobile money agents to 1,000 bank branches.

So yes - the winter is coming for the brick-and-mortar banking. But Ghana is prepared because the BoG is prepared, this government is also prepared and mobile financial services are prepared.

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