BoG grants IT Consortium enhanced Payment Service Provider license

The Bank of Ghana (BOG) has granted one of the country’s leading FinTech companies, IT Consortium Limited (ITC), an enhanced Payment Service Provider (PSP) license.

The acquisition of the license, which is the highest license within the PSP category, follows the passage of the Payment Systems and Services Act, 2019 (Act 987) which creates an enabling regulatory and supervisory framework for non-bank entities such as FinTechs to participate in Ghana’s payment ecosystem.

Aside providing financial technology solutions in areas such as insurance, investments, pensions, loans, etc, the license will also enable ITC to pursue services in merchants’ aggregation, print personalized EMV Card, deploy POS solutions, facilitate International remittance services and payment aggregation among many other services.

The license further allows other companies to plug in through IT Consortium’s systems to provide these services under its direct supervision.

Speaking on what the license means to ITC, Mr. Romeo Bugyei, Managing Director of the company said the license is a big boost to IT Consortium’s innovation drive as they boldly develop verticals around their TransFlow payments orchestration platform, fully assured of the regulator’s backing.

This also means that companies which partner with ITC can be confident that they have a partner who has passed the critical scrutiny of the Central Bank of Ghana.

He also indicated that ITC has a strategic focus to reduce fraud by building a fraud engine powered by Artificial Intelligence, which tracks fraud patterns to greatly minimize fraud activities in their ecosystem.

As the financial ecosystem matures, it is important to instil confidence in patrons, and one thing which can facilitate this is the elimination of fraud.

As more businesses move into using digital payments, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, IT Consortium’s payment service will continue to enable both private business and government agencies to safely deploy their services online.

“IT Consortium currently has operations in Liberia, Kenya and Zambia and the BOG license will boost our credibility as we continue our expansion drive across Africa,” Mr. Bugyei said.

IT Consortium is one of Africa’s leading financial services technology solutions providers and was the first Ghanaian FinTech to obtain the ISO/IEC 27001:2013 certification in addition to its Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI-DSS) certification.

The enhanced PSP license is further evidence of the company’s position as a market leader within the FinTech space and its commitment to providing innovative systems that offer competitive advantages to its clients.