Mobile money operators and banks in Ghana must learn a basic rule of modern service: when your systems are down, communicate. Silence is not neutrality. It is disrespect.

Today, mobile apps and banking platforms are not luxuries. They are how people pay for food, transport, medicine, flights, and sometimes how lives are saved. When these systems fail without notice, the consequences are not “inconvenient”; they are financially damaging, emotionally distressing, embarrassing, and occasionally dangerous.

Yesterday, a banking app did not work for an entire day. Not an hour. A full day. Worse, when I asked staff of the bank, they appeared clueless, almost as though I had been employed to report system downtime to them. That alone tells you how little some institutions care about customer experience.

Because of that failure, I lost an airline ticket opportunity. By the time I scrambled for cash and got to the agent, the price had jumped by 30%. To add insult to injury, my account had already been debited twice for failed transactions. No warning. No notice. No apology. No urgency.

We live in an era of instant SMS, emails, app notifications, websites, WhatsApp broadcasts, and social media. So what exactly stops banks and telcos from saying, plainly:
“Our system is down. We are working on it. We are sorry.”

Why must customers be left guessing, refreshing apps, moving from agent to agent, looking foolish at counters, growing angry, and sometimes exposed to real risk?

The truth is uncomfortable but obvious: many banks and telcos simply do not respect their customers. Their obsession is deduction, fees, charges, and commissions. Service reliability and communication come last. When systems work, they boast. When they fail, they vanish.

A serious institution communicates downtime, puts notices on its platforms, gives timelines, reverses failed deductions promptly, and apologises when service resumes. Anything less is arrogance.

Until banks and telcos learn that customers are not hostages but partners, this frustration will continue. And the anger is justified.