The Bank of Ghana has been named as the Central Bank of the Year for 2019 by the Central Banking Awards.The award follows impressive achievement in reforming the banking sector in Ghana. The awards will be held on 19 March 2020, in Brussels, Belgium.The Central Banking Awards recognise excellence in a community dealing with an ever-evolving landscape, where price and financial stability must be maintained and communicated against a backdrop of continuing innovation in financial services, reserves and currency management.The Central Banking Awards is an institution in Cambridge devoted to awarding excellence in central banking.“The central bank’s five-year strategy for improving payments, published in 2019 and building on a previous plan, puts great emphasis on fostering the growth of electronic means of payments and increasing financial inclusion. One key aim is to broaden the type of institutions that can offer payment services,” A report by the Central Banking Awards stated. “This kind of initiative has brought excellent results in other African countries, where the entry of telecoms companies to the payments market has vastly expanded access to banking services. The central bank wants to make it possible to use QR codes to carry out transactions. It also plans to have a regulatory sandbox in place for fintech companies by the end of 2020,” the report added. The African Central Banking Awards research carried out by Christopher Jeffery, Daniel Hinge, Dan Hardie, Rachael King, Victor Mendez-Barreira, Alice Shen and William Towning disclosed that the Bank of Ghana has an impressive record of achievement, but the most notable is its reform of a seriously undercapitalised and poorly managed banking sector.