Contactless Payments & AI: Ghana’s Next Fintech Shift

Verve just crossed 100 million cards issued across Africa—and instead of celebrating quietly, it’s pushing harder into contactless payments and tokenisation. That choice matters for Ghana more than it might look on the surface.

Most people see card milestones as “Nigeria news.” I don’t. I see it as a signal that the plumbing of African payments is finally getting modern enough for the next layer: AI in fintech—especially the kind that makes mobile money in Ghana faster, safer, and less frustrating for customers and merchants.

This post is part of our series “AI ne Fintech: Sɛnea Akɔntabuo ne Mobile Money Rehyɛ Ghana den”—a practical look at how automation, security, and smarter decision-making are shaping Ghana’s financial services. Verve’s move is a useful case study because infrastructure upgrades (contactless + tokenisation) are exactly what AI systems need to work reliably at scale.

Verve’s 100M cards: the real story isn’t the number

The headline is big—100 million cards—but the more important story is what Verve is building next:

• Contactless “tap-and-go” payments at terminals
• Tokenisation to reduce fraud and data exposure in online/digital payments
• Continued investments in chip-and-PIN and fraud-prevention systems

Verve’s MD, Vincent Ogbunude, framed the milestone as digital participation for millions of Africans. I agree with the spirit, but here’s my take: scale forces discipline. Once you’re supporting tens of millions of users, you can’t run on “best efforts.” You need uptime, fraud controls, and better user experience—because the failures become national conversations.

Why this matters for Ghana’s mobile money economy

Ghana’s payments reality is still mobile-money-heavy. Cards are growing, but MoMo is the daily driver for most households and small businesses. The link is straightforward:

When card networks improve speed and security, customer expectations shift across the entire payments ecosystem—including mobile money.

If tapping a card takes 2 seconds, nobody tolerates a mobile money checkout flow that takes 45 seconds, three prompts, and a failed confirmation SMS.

Contactless now; AI-powered banking next

Contactless payments are a distribution strategy for speed. AI is an operating strategy for scale. You typically see them rise together.

Here’s the cause-and-effect:

1. Contactless adoption increases transaction velocity (more small payments, more frequent payments).
2. Higher velocity creates more data (time, location, merchant category, device/terminal patterns).
3. More data + higher risk exposure requires better real-time decisioning.
4. Real-time decisioning is where AI-driven fintech becomes practical, not theoretical.

In Ghana, you can already feel the pressure points:

• Fraud attempts are more sophisticated than basic “blocklist” rules.
• Customer support teams are overwhelmed during outages or network delays.
• Merchants want instant confirmations and fewer reversals.

AI helps because it’s built for pattern recognition at speed—especially for:

• Fraud detection (spotting unusual behaviour across millions of events)
• Transaction routing (choosing the fastest, least-failure-prone path)
• Dispute prediction (flagging likely reversal cases early)
• Customer support automation (triaging issues before a human touches them)

This is the bridge: contactless makes payments faster; AI makes fast payments safe and dependable.

Tokenisation is the “quiet upgrade” Ghana should care about

Tokenisation sounds technical, but the idea is simple:

Tokenisation replaces sensitive card details with a substitute token, so stolen data becomes less useful to criminals.

If you’ve ever had a card used for an online purchase you didn’t make, you already understand the benefit. Tokenisation reduces the blast radius of a breach because merchants and apps don’t need to store the raw details.

The Ghana angle: token thinking for mobile money

Mobile money doesn’t work exactly like cards, but the security lesson transfers:

• Reduce exposure of sensitive identifiers
• Limit how much any single system can “see”
• Design for least privilege and containment

When fintechs in Ghana build AI features—say, automated credit scoring or merchant analytics—the temptation is to centralise everything. That’s risky.

A better approach is to copy the tokenisation mindset:

• Store fewer raw identifiers
• Use pseudonymous IDs for analytics pipelines
• Separate customer identity systems from transaction intelligence systems

AI is only as trustworthy as the security model around it. Tokenisation is proof that payment leaders are treating security as architecture, not a checklist.

Financial inclusion: the next gains come from better operations

Verve attributes its growth to partnerships with banks and fintechs that extended access to individuals, small businesses, students, and corporate customers—plus growth across ATM withdrawals, POS, online purchases, and mobile payments.

That’s the familiar inclusion narrative: “More people can transact.” Good.

But in 2026 (and yes, Ghanaian fintech teams should plan like it’s already 2026), inclusion gets judged differently:

• Can users recover quickly from errors?
• Are reversal processes predictable?
• Do micro-merchants trust digital receipts?
• Do first-time users get help without visiting a branch?

This is where I take a firm stance: the next wave of inclusion in Ghana won’t come mainly from adding new wallets. It’ll come from making existing flows boringly reliable.

AI helps improve operations in very practical ways:

AI use cases that directly reduce MoMo friction

1. Smart failure detection
   • Spot patterns like “merchant X on network Y fails every Friday evening.”
2. Real-time transaction risk scoring
   • Approve normal activity quickly, slow down suspicious attempts.
3. Automated reconciliation
   • Reduce “I sent it but they didn’t receive it” cases by matching logs faster.
4. Support copilots for agents
   • Suggest next steps and likely root cause based on the user’s history.

If you want leads (and loyal customers), solve those pains.

What Ghanaian fintechs and businesses should do next (practical checklist)

The point of watching Verve’s contactless and tokenisation push isn’t admiration—it’s preparation. Here’s what I’d implement (or demand from providers) in Ghana if speed and trust were the goal.

For fintech product teams (mobile money, wallets, aggregators)

• Instrument everything: log transaction steps end-to-end (initiation → auth → confirmation → settlement) so AI can learn where failures happen.
• Adopt “token-like” data handling: minimise raw identifiers in analytics and model training.
• Build a real-time risk engine: even a simple model beats static rules once volume grows.
• Treat reversals as a product: clear timelines, proactive notifications, and transparent status tracking.

For merchants (SMEs, retailers, e-commerce)

• Push for tap-and-go acceptance where possible: faster checkouts reduce abandonment.
• Use providers that offer strong dispute tooling: screenshots and “trust me” don’t scale.
• Watch your failure rate weekly: if 3% of payments fail at busy hours, you’re leaking revenue.

For banks and regulators (the boring work that changes everything)

• Standardise incident reporting: customers suffer most when nobody owns the failure.
• Encourage tokenisation-style controls for digital payments and APIs.
• Support secure data-sharing frameworks so AI tools can help without exposing customers.

People also ask: “Will contactless reduce mobile money usage in Ghana?”

No—at least not in the near term. Contactless grows the overall digital payments pie by making card payments more convenient for quick retail use.

What can happen is more subtle:

• Customers begin to expect faster confirmations and fewer steps
• Merchants start demanding lower failure rates and better reconciliation
• The ecosystem shifts toward systems that can make decisions instantly

That’s a win for AI-powered mobile money and AI in fintech—if Ghana’s providers invest early.

The bigger signal: Africa is standardising on speed + security

Verve’s 100 million cards milestone is impressive. The strategic move afterward is the real lesson: scale pushes payment networks toward contactless speed and tokenised security.

Ghana’s fintech ecosystem—especially mobile money—should treat that as a preview of what users will demand next. And if your product is built on slow manual ops and weak data controls, the gap will show quickly.

If you’re building or running a fintech product in Ghana, the question to ask your team this quarter is simple: Which parts of our payment flow still need humans to “notice” problems before we act? AI exists to remove that delay—while tokenisation-style design reduces the cost of getting it wrong.

The future of akɔntabuo (digital accounts) and mobile money in Ghana won’t be decided by who shouts “AI” the loudest. It’ll be decided by who makes payments feel effortless—and keeps them safe when volume spikes.