Challenge: Limited access to consumer protection in Ghana

Ghana is Africa’s leader in the adoption of digital financial services and usership of mobile money, with the objective to increase financial inclusion to at least 85% within the next two years. In 2022, 68.2% of the adult population had a bank account, more than double compared to 2011 (29.4%).

However, with more first-time financial users than ever before, access to consumer protection in the country is still limited. The current process for consumer complaints relies upon consumers’ ability to speak or write fluently in the dominant language of the financial services industry – English. Furthermore, complaints channels are limited to email and in-person kiosks, which favour urban consumers who do not face digital and physical infrastructure barriers.

Based on BFA Global’s Impact Assessment Report for Ghana, less than 5% of the population has access to central bank branches and less than 10% has access to the internet and sufficient level of literacy to file the complaints online, resulting in less than 1% of the financial consumers using the current available channels.

Besides the inaccessibility problem, the Bank of Ghana’s reliance upon manual processes and outdated systems caused delays on processing the limited number of complaints received – it took up to 20 days for their staff to analyse, access and process a complaint. Only 68% of the complaints received were successfully handled in 2020, which negatively impacted the stability of the financial system and discouraged consumers from participating in the formal financial sector.

Process: Building a national multilingual complaints system

Even before the official launch and awareness campaign occurred, the automated consumer protection system already showed significant results in engagement and inclusion. In several cases with the previous manual system, the stats were not gathered, thus limiting regulator insights and policy-making.

Solution: AI-enabled multilingual consumer protection across 805 financial institutions

To solve this problem, the Bank of Ghana deployed Proto’s automated consumer protection solution nationwide. This deployment is supported by the Africa Digital Financial Inclusion Facility (ADFI), with over USD $1 million to contribute to its goal to catalyse digital financial inclusion across the continent, increasing access and protection for vulnerable financial service consumers.

Their AI-enabled multilingual chatbot collects and categorises consumer complaints across multiple channels and all financial institutions, and has localised natural language understanding for Twi, which is spoken natively by over 58% of Ghanaians. The chatbot was already deployed to webchat and Messenger and will be deployed to SMS, WhatsApp, and Twitter within the next month.

Bank of Ghana now provides 24/7, easily accessible complaint channels for consumers across 805 financial institutions in Ghana with unlimited capacity to handle cases and immediately forward them to the responsible financial institution for resolution, with Bank of Ghana acting as an intermediate with access to view all complaints information and status. This solution provides more robust consumer protection, faster turnarounds, and is easily accessible for consumers, leading to increased financial inclusion.

The platform also offers an easy way to access consistent and complete data so Bank of Ghana can use trend analysis to identify market misconduct for faster policymaking.