Adnan Adams Mohammed
The Consolidated Bank Ghana, (CBG), has continued to reject the Ghana Card as a medium of identity for customers who want to use it for financial transactions.
CBG has introduced a verification mechanism that verifies all acceptable national identity cards before admitting those cards for any transactions.
However, the verification software keeps rejecting these cards as not the true identity of the holders after joining long queues.
Customers who are even account holders are subjected through this vigorous process and finally get their cards rejected by the machine.
‘I am frustrated now and don’t know what to do because, according to them their machine cannot verify my card and I told them I am an account holder, so they should verify my identity through that process to enable me complete my financial transaction but that was declined after spending almost two hours at the bank’, a complain from a customer.
The Bank of Ghana (BoG) has directed licensed and regulated financial institutions to undertake all transactions with the Ghana Card, effective July1, 2022.
A statement issued in Accra and signed by the Secretary of the BoG, Ms Sandra Thompson, said the directive was in line with the BoG’s objective of ensuring the safety of the financial system, pursuant to Regulation 7 of the National Identity Register, 2012 (L.I. 2111).
It said the directive covers financial institutions such as banks, specialised deposit-taking institutions, non-deposit-taking institutions; payment service providers and dedicated electronic money issuers and forex bureaus and credit reference bureaus.
The statement further directed all financial institutions to take the appropriate steps to update customer records with the Ghana Card, in consonance with Section 30 of the Anti-Money Laundering Act, 2020 (Act 1044) and Regulation 12 of the Anti-Money Laundering Regulations, 2011 (L.I. 1987).
“For Know Your Customer purposes, the National Identification Authority verification transaction platform will be integrated into the Bank of Ghana’s financial monitoring platform,” the statement said.
It also said the directive was to “ensure that all financial transactions performed within the ecosystem are linked to one identity and information, and unique codes for the transactions shared with the Bank of Ghana (BoG) to facilitate the identification of initiators/beneficiaries for track and trace purposes.”
The statement said “Notwithstanding, the objective will include but not limited to transactions by Banks, Non-bank Financial Institutions and Mobile Money Operators (MMOs).”
“The public is to note that no other form of identification will be accepted for financial transactions in all Bank of Ghana regulated financial institutions after the effective date stated above,” the statement said.
