The Head of Fintech and Innovation at the Bank of Ghana, Elhanan Owureku Asare, says technology alone cannot stop digital fraud if customers are tricked into giving away their passwords and PINs.

He said financial institutions can invest in secure applications, cybersecurity systems and stronger authentication tools, but fraudsters often bypass those protections by targeting the customer directly.

“One thing that we always forget is that we can protect the technology. We can protect it, prevent it from being hacked. Cyberattacks can be prevented. As we speak, we have FICSOC, the Financial Industry Command Security Operations Centre, where financial institutions are now adding fintechs to be connected to it to prevent cyberattacks,” Mr Asare said.

But he said the harder problem is social engineering, where fraudsters manipulate customers into giving away the very security details meant to protect them.

“However, social engineering- how do you prevent it? If somebody downloads an MTN app, or somebody downloads a bank app, or an AT app, or a Telecel app, and they go through their process, and they call the person and say, ‘We are from such and such centre. Can you repeat the OTP?’”

He said those details are part of the security layers designed to protect customers, but fraudsters are increasingly persuading victims to disclose them.

“Don’t forget that these are processes that are supposed to protect the customer. That is authentication. That same authentication, they call you for you to freely provide it, and you provide it,” he said.

“They call you again to say, can you add your PIN to it? How do you prevent that?”

Mr Asare was speaking in a yet-to-be-aired documentary, “The Trust Crisis,” ahead of the maiden Digital Economy Forum under the theme, “The Trust Crisis: Why Fraud Is Holding Back Ghana’s Digital Economy.”

The thought-leadership platform, an initiative of Hubtel, will air on JoyNews and Joy FM on Wednesday, July 22, 2026, at 8 p.m.

The forum will bring together regulators, banks, fintech companies, telecommunications firms, security agencies and consumers to examine whether Ghana’s regulatory system is keeping pace with the growth of digital finance.

Mr Asare’s warning comes as Ghana’s digital payment ecosystem continues to expand rapidly.

The Bank of Ghana’s 2024 fraud report shows that banks, specialised deposit-taking institutions and payment service providers recorded 16,733 fraud cases in 2024, up from 15,865 in 2023.

The total value at risk increased by 13 per cent, from GH¢88 million in 2023 to approximately GH¢99 million in 2024.

Payment service providers, which include electronic payment platforms, accounted for most of the reported incidents.

They recorded 15,673 electronic fraud cases in 2024, compared with 14,655 in 2023.

The value at risk in the payment service provider sector also rose by 18 per cent, from GH¢16 million to GH¢19 million.

The Bank of Ghana said fraudsters were increasingly exploiting vulnerabilities in digital payment channels, especially through mobile money and social-engineering tactics.

This means the fraud problem is not only about weak systems. It is also about how easily criminals can deceive users into handing over access to their own accounts.

Mr Asare said the industry is likely to introduce stronger authentication systems as the threat evolves.

“I think we are probably getting to a point where we are going to have four-factor authentication. We are going to have five-factor authentication,” he said.

But he warned that more security layers could also make digital payments slower and less convenient for customers.

“We also need to be careful. We need to juxtapose it with customer experience. The more layers we put in place, we get to a point where we say, when you transact, you have to wait for five minutes for us to go through all the levels of authentication,” he said.

He said the challenge is to find the right balance between security and convenience.

“I know the industry is actively working towards making sure that the right balance between protecting the consumer and making sure that experience is rich is ongoing. But we need to make sure that at the end of the day, the customer is protected and the experience is rich,” he added.

The warning is significant because speed and convenience are among the main reasons many Ghanaians have adopted digital payments.

Payment service providers processed approximately 8.1 billion transactions valued at GH¢3 trillion in 2024.

This represented a 19 per cent increase in transaction volume from 6.8 billion in 2023, while transaction value rose by 58 per cent from GH¢1.9 trillion.

But as more money moves digitally, fraudsters are also shifting from physical theft to digital deception.

Mr Asare said the movement from cash to electronic payments has changed the nature of financial crime.

He said that, “Anytime you move from a particular way of doing things to a new area, the risks shift towards that end. We used to have physical fraud, burglary and major robberies because people kept cash in different places. Now, it is becoming digital fraud or digital burglary, or digital armed robbery. Having a manual approach towards everything limits its scale. But the moment you digitise it, the scale becomes much easier, and it cuts across. So, the scale at which we are dealing with fraud is much larger than when it was more manual or cash-based.”

The Bank of Ghana’s 2024 fraud report directed payment service providers to strengthen authentication, introduce customer-behaviour monitoring technologies, educate customers and intensify the monitoring and training of mobile money agents.

Banks and specialised deposit-taking institutions were also directed to work with law-enforcement agencies and other stakeholders to ensure that suspected fraudsters are apprehended and prosecuted.

For Mr Asare, customer protection remains central to the survival of Ghana’s digital payment system.

He said repeated fraud experiences could weaken public trust and slow Ghana’s transition to a cash-lite economy. He said if customers are not protected, fraud could become a threat to wider financial stability.

“Customer protection is paramount when it comes to applications and our oversight work. We want to make sure that you have the right tools and the right authentication to protect the customer. If the customer is not protected and almost every time they are being defrauded, it will impact financial stability,” he said.

The central issue ahead of the Digital Economy Forum is whether Ghana’s fast-growing financial technology space can protect users from the very scams that now threaten public confidence.

Digital payments may keep improving, but the system will remain exposed if customers continue to be deceived into giving fraudsters access to their accounts.

For regulators, banks, fintech companies, telecommunications firms and security agencies, the task is to make digital payments safer without making them so burdensome that consumers return to cash.