Heads of Mobile Commerce departments of three telecom operators doing Money Commerce in Ghana have expressed the need for government and the regulators to get actively involved and push the public awareness campaign for the wider acceptance and use of Mobile Money as a major means of transaction over cash.The telco executives think the 99.7% mobile penetration in Ghana, makes Mobile Money a key driver to the expected cashless or cashlite society that government is seeking to take the Ghanaian economy to, and that is enough reason for government and the regulator to play a leading role in public education about Mobile Money.They say Mobile Money requires a massive multi-approach public education on a scale that is too expensive for any individual telco to bear so it behooves the regulators, Bank of Ghana (BOG), the National Communication Authority (NCA), and government to drive it ‘aggressively’ as part of march towards a cashless society. The telcos have proposed government and regulator support in the form of massive and regular endorsements, encouragement of state agencies to use Mobile Money for small payments, augmentation of funding for the public awareness campaign, and garnering of media support for same. There are three Mobile Money services in Ghana: MTN Mobile Money, Airtel Money and Tigo Cash. The services range from airtime purchase, peer-to-peer money transfer, bulk payment, bill/fees payment, shopping on and offline, payment in restaurants, insurance services and a bevy of mobile banking services.Mobile Money promises convenience, safety, security and affordability in the movement of money across the country. But a recent research by Ericsson on Mobile Money in Ghana and two other countries (South Africa and Tanzania) indicated that in spite of the high penetration of mobile subscriptions and all the mobile money promises, only about 9% of mobile phone users in Ghana had Mobile Money accounts between 2011 and 2012. The rate has since increased to 16.5% (over 4.1 million), out of which market leader MTN boasts of 2 million customers, followed by Tigo with around 1.2million on Tigo Cash, and Airtel with 900,000 Airtel Money customers.But in terms of actual usage, Tigo is talking of only 13% of its Tigo Cash customers being active; MTN says 100,000 are active, and Airtel says it records 18,000 activities on daily basis.MTN is recording 1.5 million Mobile Money transactions worth over GHC50 million every month; Tigo talks of between five and six transactions a month by each of its 13% active Tigo Cash subscribers, and that is worth some GHC11 million electronic money moving daily on its platform; and Airtel is also reporting over GHC4 million floating on the Airtel Money platform at any point in time.Those were all moneys that would have been moved in the form of cash with all the attendant risks and inconveniences.Meanwhile Vodafone Ghana has also hinted it would launch Mobile Money this year, but it is barely seven weeks to the end of the year, and it is still not clear if the launch would happen before the close of the year. The relatively low acceptability and use of Mobile Money has been attributed to misconceptions about the impact of network quality on the reliability of the services, plus the perceived ‘cumbersome’ SMS-based registration for the service, non-interoperability of the respective platforms, and the cost involved in using the service as compared with holding one’s cash for transactions. People also suspect, without evidence, that there are hidden charges.The individual telcos, have been doing their own education and promotional campaigns about Mobile Money to drive home its relative reliability, safety, security, convenience and cost-effectiveness, but the penetration level shows not much has been achieved.