Adjoa finished the project on a Friday. She had been working on the brand identity for six weeks — the logo system, the typography, the colour palette, the full set of social media templates. She delivered everything the client had asked for. She sent the files. She sent the invoice. She sent a follow-up message the following Tuesday. And then another the week after that. The client went quiet.
There was no escrow. There was no platform holding the payment until delivery was confirmed. There was no contract that could be practically enforced for an amount that, while significant to Adjoa, was too small to justify a lawyer. Six weeks of work. Gone. She moved on because she had no other choice.
This is not an unusual story in Ghana’s digital economy. It is the normal story. And the fact that it keeps happening — in a country that processed GHS 4.54 trillion through mobile money in 2025 — tells you something important about what is actually broken.
The payment infrastructure works. The problem is that payment and delivery are two different events, and there is almost nothing in between guaranteeing that one follows the other. Ghana has built exceptional rails for moving money. It has not yet built the infrastructure for moving trust.
Ghana built exceptional rails for moving money. It has not yet built the infrastructure for moving trust.
At the 2025 Fintech Stakeholder Forum in Accra, Clara B. Arthur, Chief Executive of the Ghana Interbank Payment and Settlement Systems (GhIPSS), said something that deserves to be repeated slowly. Despite the rapid expansion of mobile money and digital payment platforms, research shows that only 42% of users trust digital finance systems. Arthur called the figure “worrying and unacceptable.”
That number is the real metric. Not the volume. The trust. You can move trillions of cedis through a system and still have a marketplace where neither the buyer nor the seller is confident the other will follow through. Volume and trust are not the same thing. Ghana has been building the first and neglecting the second, and the gap between them is where billions of cedis in economic value disappear every year.
The Three Layers of the Trust Tax
The trust deficit does not show up in one place. It accumulates across three distinct layers of the Ghanaian and African commercial economy, each reinforcing the others.
The first is the individual layer. This is Adjoa’s story and a thousand versions of it playing out daily. The freelancer who demands full payment upfront because she has been burned before, and loses the client to someone who will accept less security. The supplier who ships goods on credit because the relationship demands it, and absorbs the loss when payment does not arrive. The small trader who will only do business in person, face to face, because there is no platform she trusts to mediate the transaction digitally. Every one of these is a rational response to a broken trust environment. Every one of them is also a drag on commerce, a hidden cost embedded in prices, timelines, and deals that never happen.
The second is the institutional layer. Between 2020 and 2026, the world’s largest banks have been quietly exiting Africa in a process that finance professionals call de-risking. Barclays completed its exit from African correspondent banking in 2022. Standard Chartered divested subsidiaries across Angola, Cameroon, Gambia, Sierra Leone, and Zimbabwe between 2022 and 2025. Société Générale divested its Moroccan and Algerian interests. These banks decided that African transactions carried too much compliance risk for too little return. Africa loses an estimated $5 billion annually to this correspondent banking retreat. For Ghanaian businesses trying to engage in international trade, the result is higher costs, longer settlement windows, and in some cases, no viable pathway at all.
The third layer is the one that does not make headlines but should. Ghana Business News reported that $31 billion in import transactions were recorded in Ghana, with no goods ever arriving. Of all those transactions, only 10,440 were linked to actual imports. That figure is not just about fraud. It is the dollar expression of a system where transactions occur without any enforceable delivery guarantee on either side. The payment happens. The goods do not. And there is no infrastructure to reliably distinguish the legitimate transaction from the fraudulent one before the money moves.
$31 billion in import transactions. No goods arrived. That is what a trust deficit looks like at scale.
Each layer feeds the others. The individual freelancer has no recourse infrastructure because the institutional layer decided African markets were not worth the risk. The institutional layer retreated because the transaction-level trust signals were too weak and too costly to verify. The weak signals persist because no one has built the technology to make them legible. It is a closed loop, and it has been running quietly for decades beneath the headline numbers of Ghana’s mobile money success.
The Rails Were Always the Easy Part
Boston Consulting Group’s 2026 report, “Beyond Payments: Unlocking Africa’s Second FinTech Wave,” puts this structural problem in its clearest terms yet. Africa now accounts for 74% of global mobile money transaction volume. The payment rails work. But more than 50% of lending across sub-Saharan Africa still flows through informal or semiformal channels. The first wave of African fintech built the pipes. The second wave has to build what flows through them: credit, assurance, and verified commitment.
The BCG analysis identifies four engines of the second wave: B2B payments, government digitisation, interoperable credit rails, and data-driven underwriting. What unites all four is trust, specifically, the ability to transform transaction data into something that institutions and individuals can rely on as a basis for extending credit, entering contracts, and taking commercial risk with people they do not know personally.
This is what makes the trust problem so consequential. It is not just about individual transactions. The entire architecture of formal credit depends on a bedrock of verifiable commercial history. When a bank assesses a loan application, it is asking: has this business demonstrated, over time, that it does what it says it will do? In mature markets, that question is answered by credit bureaus, payment records, and the legal infrastructure that makes contracts enforceable. In Ghana, for most SMEs, the answer to that question is: we have mobile money records, and not much else.
BCG’s core argument is that transforming transaction data into credit infrastructure is the defining challenge of the second wave. Ghana has extraordinary data: GHS 4.54 trillion in transactions, a year’s worth of commercial behaviour recorded at the individual and business level. But the systems to turn that data into trust signals, credit histories, and underwriting inputs are still rudimentary. The rails generate the data. The infrastructure to make the data meaningful does not yet exist at scale.
Building Trust as Technology
What does it look like when a builder decides to treat trust as a technology problem rather than a cultural or regulatory one?
It looks like Crednce. The Accra-based platform describes itself as Africa’s delivery guarantee platform. Its proposition is stated in four words: Verified Work. Protected Payment. The mechanism is precise, milestone-based agreements that release payment only when delivery is confirmed, AI-powered verification of completed work, and automated dispute resolution that does not require either party to hire a lawyer or wait for a slow institutional process to resolve the disagreement. The platform is early stage, and its transaction volume reflects that. But the architecture it is building is not niche. It is the contractual layer that African commerce at the SME level has never had.
The logic is straightforward. In a marketplace where trust is the scarce resource, the platform that produces trust at scale becomes the most valuable piece of infrastructure in the ecosystem. Not the payment platform, the trust platform. Mobile money solved the problem of moving money. The next problem is verifying that the thing the money was supposed to pay for actually happened.
This is precisely why BCG’s second wave analysis maps so directly to what founders like the Crednce team are building. The formal financial system, banks, correspondent banks, and credit bureaus were designed to produce trust at industrial scale. When those institutions retreat from African markets, or when they never arrived in the first place, the trust production function does not disappear. It falls to individuals, who produce it expensively and inefficiently through personal relationships and social pressure. Platforms like Crednce are attempting to industrialise that process, to produce trust at the speed and scale that commerce requires without depending on personal relationships that do not scale.
The formal financial system was designed to produce trust at industrial scale. When it retreats, that function falls to individuals. Platforms like Crednce are trying to industrialise it.
There is a deeper systemic argument here. The transaction-level trust data that platforms like Crednce generate is not just useful to the parties in a single deal. It is the raw material for the credit infrastructure that BCG says the second wave requires. Every verified delivery, every milestone completed on time, every dispute resolved through the platform rather than abandoned is a data point in a commercial history that did not exist before. Aggregate that history across thousands of transactions and you begin to build something that looks like credit infrastructure, not issued by a bank, not underwritten by an institution, but generated organically by a marketplace that has learned to verify its own commitments.
That is not a small idea. That is the infrastructure argument for why trust platforms matter beyond the individual transaction.
What This Means for Every Builder Operating in Ghana Today
President Mahama’s government established a $50 million Fintech Growth Fund for SMEs in 2026. The fund is a signal that the government understands that access to finance is a structural problem. But access to finance and access to trust are not the same problem, and money alone does not solve the second one. A loan does not tell a client to pay you after delivery. A government fund does not verify that the goods arrived. Institutional capital addresses the capital gap. It does not address the commitment gap.
Every business operating in Ghana’s digital economy right now is absorbing a trust tax. Some of it is visible, in the escrow workarounds built by hand, the face-to-face verification trips that eat a morning, the upfront payment demands that price you out of clients who could have been long-term relationships. Most of it is invisible — in the deals that never started because the risk of moving first was too high, the prices inflated to account for the probability of non-payment, the talent wasted on chasing receipts instead of creating value.
The builders who are reducing that tax in their own workflows, by structuring milestone agreements, using platforms that verify delivery, and refusing to work without basic contractual protections, are not just protecting themselves. They are generating the transaction-level trust data that the second wave of African fintech needs to function. They are, without necessarily knowing it, building the credit infrastructure of the future one verified transaction at a time.
Trust is not soft infrastructure. It is the hardest infrastructure problem on the continent, harder than the payment rails, harder than the regulatory frameworks, harder than the capital access problem that consumes most of the policy conversation. The payment rails took a generation to build. The trust layer will take another.
The question for every builder reading this is not whether that layer will eventually exist. It will. The question is whether you are waiting for institutions to build it, or building around them in the meantime.
Adjoa finished her next project with a milestone agreement in place. She got paid.
DATA SOURCES
Bank of Ghana, Mobile Money Transaction Data, Full Year 2025 • Ghana Interbank Payment and Settlement Systems (GhIPSS), 2025 Fintech Stakeholder Forum, Accra, October 2025 • Boston Consulting Group, ‘Beyond Payments: Unlocking Africa’s Second FinTech Wave,’ April 2026 • Finance in Africa, ‘Africa Loses $5bn Annually to Correspondent Banking,’ April 2026 • Ghana Business News, Illicit Financial Flows Report, November 2025 • ODI Global, AfCFTA Digital Trade Protocol Analysis, 2026 • Chambers and Partners, 2026 International Trade Guide (Ghana Mobile Money Data)
