Contactless & Tokenisation: What Verve’s 100M Means

Verve hitting 100 million cards issued across Africa isn’t just a nice milestone for a payments brand. It’s a loud signal that African consumers and merchants are settling an argument: digital payments have become mainstream, and now the real fight is about speed, trust, and safety.

If you’re building in Ghana’s fintech space—or you run a business that depends on payments—this matters because cards are no longer “the alternative” to mobile money. They’re becoming part of the same everyday payment mix: MoMo for quick transfers, cards for merchant purchases and online subscriptions, and wallets sitting on top of both.

This post is part of our series “AI ne Fintech: Sɛnea Akɔntabuo ne Mobile Money Rehyɛ Ghana den”—how AI is strengthening accounting, mobile money, and fintech operations in Ghana. Verve’s next bet—contactless payments and tokenisation—is exactly where AI becomes practical, not theoretical.

Why 100 million cards is really a “scale test”

Answer first: A card scheme reaching 100 million issued cards proves it can operate at national-and-regional scale—where small weaknesses (fraud, downtime, settlement delays) become expensive problems.

At low volume, many payment issues are annoying but manageable: a few fraud cases, occasional chargebacks, some failed transactions. At scale, those same issues become operational fires that burn cash and trust.

Verve’s growth came through partnerships with banks and fintechs, expanding usage across:

• ATM withdrawals
• point-of-sale transactions
• online purchases
• mobile payments

That mix is important. It tells you the market isn’t one-dimensional; people don’t “switch” from one rail to another. They stack rails.

What this means for Ghana’s mobile money reality

Ghana’s mobile money ecosystem is already strong, but it also has clear friction points: fraud attempts, mistaken transfers, disputes, merchant onboarding, reconciliation, and the daily headache of matching payments to invoices.

When cards scale across Africa, it pushes Ghana’s ecosystem in two ways:

1. Merchants expect faster checkout (tap-and-go instead of PIN delays).
2. Consumers expect safer online payments (less fear of card details being stolen).

This is where the series theme comes in: AI-based automation is what makes that reliability affordable.

Contactless payments: speed is the product

Answer first: Contactless payments win because they reduce checkout time and raise transaction throughput—especially during peak seasons like December.

It’s late December 2025. In Ghana, that’s church conventions, weddings, end-of-year shopping, family travel, and events. Payments stack up fast—and queues kill sales.

Contactless changes the experience in a simple way: tap, approve, done. For merchants, the benefit is not abstract—it’s measurable:

• Shorter queues
• More transactions per hour
• Fewer cash-handling issues
• Better customer satisfaction (people notice speed)

The operational catch: contactless increases your “risk surface”

Faster payments also mean faster fraud attempts. The more “frictionless” you make the customer journey, the more you must strengthen the invisible controls behind the scenes.

That’s why Verve pairing contactless with tokenisation is the right direction. Speed without security is a short-lived win.

Where AI fits in contactless rollouts

Here’s what works in practice: contactless adoption grows fastest when providers use AI to improve approvals without adding friction.

AI models can help payment providers and merchants by:

• Detecting abnormal behaviour in real time (device, location, merchant category, spend pattern)
• Reducing false declines (legit customers get approved more often)
• Optimising risk rules by segment (new users vs. long-time customers)

A good fraud system is not “block more.” It’s block smarter.

Tokenisation: the simplest way to reduce fraud blast radius

Answer first: Tokenisation protects users by ensuring the card number isn’t what travels through the internet; a substitute token does—so stolen data is far less useful.

Tokenisation replaces sensitive card details with a token—a value that can be limited to a specific merchant, device, or transaction context. If attackers get the token, it typically can’t be reused elsewhere.

For Ghanaian businesses selling online (Instagram sellers using payment links, SMEs with Shopify-style storefronts, schools collecting fees digitally), tokenisation matters because it reduces two painful outcomes:

1. Card-not-present fraud (unauthorised online payments)
2. Data compromise fallout (breaches become less damaging)

Tokenisation and mobile money aren’t competing ideas

Most teams talk about “cards vs mobile money” as if customers must choose. They won’t.

A more realistic view is:

• Mobile money is excellent for P2P transfers and bill pay
• Cards are strong for merchant purchases, online subscriptions, and international services
• Wallets and apps sit on top of both

Tokenisation supports that blended future because it makes digital payments safer across channels.

Practical example (Ghana): reducing disputes for subscription payments

If your business runs recurring billing—gym memberships, software, online lessons—tokenisation can reduce disputes because:

• credentials can be device-bound
• suspicious recurring patterns can be flagged
• reattempt logic can be tuned without exposing card details

Add AI on top and you get a powerful combo: tokenised credentials + intelligent retry + risk scoring.

What Verve’s milestone signals for Ghana’s fintech builders

Answer first: Verve’s 100 million cards show the next phase of fintech competition in Africa is “trust infrastructure”—fraud prevention, uptime, dispute handling, and reconciliation.

Lots of products can collect money. Fewer can do it reliably at scale.

If you’re building in Ghana—payments, lending, accounting, agency banking, or merchant tools—these are the four areas where I’d focus:

1) Fraud prevention that doesn’t punish good users

Most companies get this wrong: they either block too aggressively (hurting conversion) or stay too lax (inviting losses).

A better approach is layered:

• Real-time transaction scoring (AI/ML)
• Step-up authentication only when risk is high
• Human review workflows for edge cases
• Post-transaction monitoring and rapid customer support

2) Reconciliation automation for MoMo + cards

Ghanaian SMEs often run “manual finance ops”: screenshots, WhatsApp confirmations, Excel, and end-of-month stress.

AI can assist with akɔntabuo (accounting) automation:

• auto-matching payment references to invoices
• flagging duplicates and partial payments
• predicting which settlements are likely to fail
• generating daily cash-position summaries

The value isn’t fancy dashboards. It’s fewer mistakes and faster closing.

3) Smarter dispute and chargeback handling

Disputes are where trust is built or destroyed.

AI can help by:

• clustering dispute reasons (merchant category, time window, customer segment)
• detecting friendly fraud patterns
• producing better evidence packs faster (timestamps, device signals, delivery proof)

If you reduce resolution time from weeks to days, customers feel it.

4) Merchant acceptance expansion (offline and online)

Verve’s partnerships point to a truth: distribution wins. Ghana’s opportunity is helping merchants accept multiple rails without complexity.

What merchants want is simple:

• one device or one app
• clear settlement timelines
• transparent fees
• support that picks up

AI can reduce support load via better self-service, automated issue triage, and proactive outage alerts.

“People also ask” (quick answers for decision-makers)

Is contactless payments adoption realistic in Ghana?

Yes—especially in urban centres and organised retail. Adoption follows terminal availability, consumer education, and reliable dispute handling.

Does tokenisation matter if we already use OTPs?

Yes. OTPs help authenticate a transaction. Tokenisation reduces what’s exposed if data leaks, and it improves safety for stored credentials.

Where should a fintech start with AI: fraud or accounting automation?

Start where losses or workload are highest. For many payment businesses, that’s fraud scoring and reconciliation—because both show impact quickly.

What to do next (if you run a fintech or merchant business in Ghana)

Verve’s 100 million cards and its move toward contactless and tokenisation point to one clear direction: payments are scaling, and the winners will be the ones who make trust cheap to maintain. AI is how you get there.

If you’re planning your 2026 roadmap, pick one practical project and ship it:

1. Add risk scoring that reduces false declines by segment
2. Tokenise stored payment credentials for online checkout
3. Automate MoMo + card reconciliation into your accounting workflow
4. Improve dispute turnaround time with AI-assisted triage

The question worth sitting with is this: when your transaction volume doubles, will your fraud losses and operational workload double too—or will your systems get smarter?