A certified fraud examiner and professional investigator, Ransford Nana Addo Junior has called for the Ghana Card to be fully integrated into Ghana’s payment systems, warning that simply showing the card as proof of identity is no longer enough to tackle rising financial fraud.

Speaking on Joy FM’s Super Morning Show on Thursday, July 9, during a discussion on growing financial fraud losses, he said Ghana must move beyond the practice of using the Ghana Card only as a visual form of identification and instead make it a key part of authentication across banking and mobile money services.

According to him, stronger use of the Ghana Card, especially through biometric verification, could help reduce fraud linked to impersonation, fake SIM registration and the use of mobile wallets opened with false identities.

“We have to move away from showing Ghana Card and implementing it as a key aspect of our procedures within the payment system,” he said.

He warned that if this is not done, the country could face an even worse fraud situation, particularly as more stolen money is channelled through mobile wallets and digital transfers.

“If we don’t do that, we’re going to have a worsening situation because the monies are moved onto wallets,” he added.

Ransford said one of the major weaknesses in Ghana’s fraud prevention system is that many institutions still rely on the Ghana Card mainly as a document that is shown physically, rather than using its full verification features.

He said that merely checking the face on the card does not provide enough protection in an era where fraudsters are becoming more sophisticated.

“And people are holding the Ghana Card, just showing the face on it. But anybody can put anybody’s picture on it and say, ‘Oh, he showed the Ghana Card,’” he said.

For him, the real value of the Ghana Card lies in its ability to support proper identity verification, especially through biometric checks.

He pointed to the banking sector as an example of where the card is already helping to strengthen security when used properly.

“So, in environments like the banks, where the Ghana Card has become a compulsory authentication, if you come and you want to withdraw money, we need to do the biometrics, put your fingers on the system and verify that the card that we have, the picture on it, this is the human being,” he explained.

He said that there are different ways of validating a person’s identity, but biometric authentication remains the most reliable.

“There are three forms of validations or authentications. Best among them is biometric,” he said.

Ransford believes Ghana has not yet made full use of the Ghana Card system, despite its potential to help deal with fraud across the financial sector.

“We have a very good system called Ghana Card, and we have utilised just about 30 per cent of what it can do,” he said.

He said the country’s payment ecosystem, especially mobile money and other digital payment channels, would be far safer if the Ghana Card was fully embedded into account opening, wallet registration and transaction verification processes.

In his view, that is particularly important because stolen funds do not simply disappear. They are usually transferred into another account or mobile wallet, which means investigators should be able to trace them if the systems are built around strong identity checks.

“What we are seeing in the payment system and the payment service providers means that our SIM registration and our wallet architecture and policy in our wallet is a problem. Because if these monies are stolen, they do not go into the air. They go onto accounts. They go onto wallets,” he said.

Ransford said the answer lies in tightening SIM registration, linking it properly to the Ghana Card, and making biometric verification compulsory throughout Ghana’s payment ecosystem.

“It means that we need to tackle our SIM registration, sync it with our Ghana Card and make biometric authentication compulsory at every stage of our payment services,” he said.

He said that impersonation appears to be reducing in some areas and believes the Ghana Card is already playing a role in that progress.

“If you look at the report very well, there’s something unique a lot of people have not paid attention to. Impersonation is dropping. The Ghana Card factor has come to play,” he said.

This comes after the Central Bank's 2025 Fraud Report shows that reported fraud cases across banks, specialised deposit-taking institutions (SDIs) and payment service providers (PSPs) increased from 15,164 in 2022 to 24,778 in 2025.

Over the same period, the total value at risk rose from GH¢82 million to GH¢101 million, highlighting the growing threat fraud poses to Ghana's financial system.

The Bank of Ghana said the increase has been driven largely by the rapid expansion of the payment service provider sector, where the widespread adoption of mobile money and other digital payment platforms has created new opportunities for fraudsters.