Before Hubtel: 

An insurance company that could only sell when its offices were open 

Ghana’s insurance market runs on agents and brokers. An agent or broker finds the customer, explains the product, processes the policy, and collects the premium. The system works when the agent can work. When the agent cannot, nothing moves. 

For this insurer, that meant every sale depended on office hours. A customer who wanted to buy a motor policy on a Saturday had one option: wait until Monday. An agent who had a willing buyer at 7pm had no way to close the sale at such an hour. They would have to call a branch colleague, ask someone to log in on their behalf, or tell the customer to come back during the week. Some customers came back. Many did not. 

Payments, when they did come in, arrived through every channel available. Cash at the counter. Mobile money. Bank transfers. Cheques. Each one landed in a different place and stayed there until someone manually pulled it all together.  

The reporting system they used was only accessible to staff. That meant a customer who wanted to buy could not do it on their own. An agent who wanted to sign someone on could not do that. Every transaction required a branch, a desk, and someone sitting at it. 

Insurance is a business built on relationships and timing. The relationship part worked. The timing did not. Customers who needed to act outside working hours had nowhere to go, and agents who wanted to serve them had no tool to help. 

Bringing Clarity: 

Putting insurance in the hands of agents and customers, wherever they are 

Hubtel came onboard to build a digital distribution and management system that would allow the business sell and serve outside the limits of its branches. The solution was direct: give agents a mobile tool, give customers a self-service option, and give branch staff a live view of the policies in their care. 

Hubtel built three interconnected portals and refreshed the company’s website. 

The Agent Portal was designed to work anytime, anywhere. An agent can now generate an insurance sticker, process a motor policy, or renew a travel policy from wherever they are. A customer who wants to buy on a Saturday afternoon can complete the transaction with their agent without either of them needing to set foot in a branch. 

The Customer Portal gives policyholders direct access to their own accounts. They can buy a motor or travel policy, renew an existing one, or manage multiple policies from their device. 

The Staff Portal gives branch teams a live view of what is happening in their branch: active policies, the total premiums those policies represent, and policies expiring within the next 90 days. Before this, a branch manager who wanted to know how many customers were coming up for renewal had to run a manual report from the system.  

Alongside the three portals, the company’s website was reorganized. An AI-powered chatbot, built to handle customer inquiries and capture leads, was integrated into the site. The chatbot has since generated significant customer interaction volume, helping the business understand what customers are asking and what they need before they ever speak to an agent. 

The five components Hubtel built: 

Putting Management in Control:

A live view of what every branch holds and what every agent earns 

Before the portals existed, staff relied on an internal system to understand what had been collected and which policies were active. The Staff Portal introduced a better management system.

A branch manager can now open the portal and see exactly how many policies are active, how much premium those policies represent, and how many customers are approaching their renewal date. Policies expiring within 90 days are surfaced directly, giving staff a clear, time-sensitive list to work from rather than a report they must search through. 

For the business, the Agent Portal introduced a layer of performance visibility. Every transaction an agent processes goes through the portal; the business can now see how much each agent is collecting, in which months, and from which policy lines. That data is the foundation for understanding which agents are most productive and where additional support or incentive would have the most impact. 

The monthly collection data from the Agent Portal tells its own story. In January 2026, agents collected GHS 604,794 through the portal. By May 2026, that figure had grown to GHS 970,649; a 60% increase in five months. The business can see that growth in real time and make decisions based on what is happening, not on what happened last month. 

What changed operationally: 

Pursuing Growth:

What agents with better tools produce 

The clearest proof of what the platform has produced is in comparison between agents who use it and agents who do not. 

Between January and May 2025, we tracked the performance of two groups of agents: 50 agents actively using the Agent Portal and 462 who were not. The portal agents sold an average of 16.87 policies per month. The non-portal agents sold an average of 9.16 per month. On a per-agent basis, portal users sold 84% more policies than their counterparts who were still working without a digital tool. 

Figure 1: Average policies sold per agent per month, January to May 2025 

The consistency of that advantage matters as much as the average. The portal agents outperformed non-portal agents in every month tracked: January, March, April, and May. The gap was widest in May, where portal agents averaged 14.82 policies against 5.16 for non-portal agents, a difference of nearly 3 to 1 that month. The advantage was not a single month of strong performance. It held across the whole period. 

The portal collection figures show the same direction of travel. In October 2024, when the portals first went live, total monthly collections through all three portals came to GHS 3,865. By July 2025, that figure had reached GHS 1.67 million in a single month. That is a growth of more than 430 times in nine months. 

Figure 2: Monthly collections through all portals, October 2024 to May 2026 (GHS) 

By 2026, the Agent Portal had become the dominant collection channel. Of the GHS 1.41 million collected across all portals in May 2026, the Agent Portal accounted for GHS 970,649, just under 69% of the total. The Customer Portal, which allows policyholders to transact directly without an agent, contributed GHS 114,765, its highest monthly figure to date and a sign that direct customer adoption is also building. 

Figure 3: Portal collections by channel, January to May 2026 (GHS Thousands) 

Collections grew from GHS 3.32 million in 2021 to GHS 19.74 million in 2025, an increase of 495% over four years. The 2025 total was the strongest year on record, supported by a 101.8% increase in transaction volume that year alone. 

Figure 4: Annual collections received via Hubtel, 2021 to 2026 YTD (GHS Millions) 

The year-by-year breakdown: 

The average transaction value grew from GHS 355.99 in 2021 to GHS 589.07 per customer by May 2026. This indicates that customers are not just paying more often. They are also paying for larger and more valuable policies each time. That is a sign of deeper engagement with the product, not just higher volumes going through the same channel. 

The Agent Portal has 50 active users who consistently outperform a group eight times larger that does not use it. The portals collectively processed GHS 1.41 million in May 2026, up from GHS 3,865 nineteen months earlier. And the average transaction value is rising every year. These numbers point in the same direction: the agents and customers who are using the platform are doing more business, at higher values, with more consistency than those who are not. 

Before Hubtel:

A gaming & entertainment company entering Ghana with no payment infrastructure 

A leading pan-African sports gaming & entertainment company entered the Ghanaian market with a strong product and a large customer base already built across other African markets. What they did not have was a way to collect money or pay money out to their customers. 

In the gaming & entertainment industry, a customer usually deposits money into their account, places a bet, and if they win, expects to receive their winnings quickly. Those two actions, depositing and withdrawing, are the core of the business. If either of them fails, even for a few minutes, the customer notices immediately and the business stands at risk of losing trust. The faster the event, the faster the expectation. A customer watching a live match and trying to place a bet has very little tolerance for payment glitches. 

Finding a payment processor that could handle that kind of volume in Ghana was paramount. The company needed a partner that could process deposits at very high speed, disburse winnings just as fast, and hold up reliably during the peak moments when thousands of customers are active at the same time.  

They also needed payment channels that reached all their customers, not just those with smartphones or bank accounts. Customers who did not have smartphones needed a USSD code to transact. Any payment solution that worked only for smartphone users would leave a fraction of the market unreachable. 

Hubtel was the first payment processor the company worked with in Ghana. There was no existing infrastructure to migrate from. The entire payment operation was built from a standing start. 

Bringing Clarity:

Building the payment infrastructure the business needed to operate 

Hubtel connected the two core payment flows the business runs on. The Receive Money API handles customer deposits: a customer adds funds to their account using mobile money or bank, and the transaction is confirmed instantly. The Send Money API handles disbursements: when a customer wins a bet, the winnings are sent directly to their mobile money. Both APIs were exactly what the business needed to handle the speed and volume that a live gaming & entertainment operation demands.  

We also provided a USSD payment channel to reach customers who did not use smartphones. A customer can deposit into their account by dialing a short code, without needing internet access. 

On top of the payment channels, we provided a set of supporting services. An SMS and Notification API to deliver one-time passwords, transaction confirmations, and campaign messages to customers. A Balance Query API lets the operator check account balances programmatically. A Transfer API moves funds between accounts. A Merchant Dashboard gives the operator’s team a view of transaction activity across all channels in one place. 

The demands placed on this infrastructure were significant from the start. In the gaming & entertainment industry, transactions usually arrive in bursts, concentrated around major fixtures and live events. During a Champions League evening or a major African competition, the volume of deposit and withdrawal requests rises sharply in a very short window. Building infrastructure that could absorb those spikes without slowing down or failing required Hubtel to invest deeply in the reliability and capacity of its payment platform. The infrastructure we provided to serve this business became the most capable version of its payment systems at that point in time. 

The solutions Hubtel provides to the operator: 

Putting Management in Control:

Reliability as the foundation of a high-volume operation 

For a business that processes transactions around major sporting events, the most important thing a payment platform can provide is not just speed. It is consistency. A system that works well most of the time but fails during the moments of highest demand is not a system a gaming & entertainment operator can build on. 

The Merchant Dashboard gives the operator’s team a real-time view of what is flowing in and out across all payment channels. Deposits, disbursements, transaction counts, and channel performance are visible in one place. When a live event is driving high volumes, the team can see what is happening on the dashboard as it happens, rather than finding out after the fact. 

Five years on, we have processed 2.98 billion successful transactions. The word successful in that figure carries operational weight. It means the vast majority of what customers have tried to do has worked. 

Pursuing Growth: 

Five years, GHS 162 billion, and a record set every year 

In 2021, Hubtel processed GHS 5.94 billion in combined transaction value for the operator across all payment channels. In 2025, that figure was GHS 52.53 billion. From one year to the next, across every year in the dataset, the total has grown. 

Figure 1: Combined transaction value processed by Hubtel, 2021 to 2026 YTD (GHS Billions) 

The growth was steepest in the early years. Combined transaction value grew 122% in 2022 and 96% in 2023. These were the years in which the operator established its full commercial scale in Ghana, building a customer base and a volume of activity that has continued to grow since. 

By 2025, we had processed GHS 28.88 billion in deposits alone across 625.1 million transactions. That is an average of more than 1.7 million deposit transactions every single day of the year. The Send Money API processed GHS 23.65 billion in the same year, distributing winnings to customers across 100 million individual disbursements. 

Figure 2: Receive Money and Send Money volumes by year, 2021 to 2026 YTD (GHS Billions) 

Transaction volumes tell the same story from a different angle. On the Receive Money API, the number of deposit transactions grew from 204.6 million in 2021 to 625.1 million in 2025. On the Send Money API, disbursement transactions grew from 28.1 million to 100 million over the same period. Together, both API processed 725 million transactions in 2025 alone. 

Figure 3: Transaction volume by channel, 2021 to 2026 YTD (Millions) 

In 2021, the average Receive Money transaction per customer was worth GHS 15.91. By the first five months of 2026, it had grown to GHS 53.22. On the Send Money API, the average disbursement grew from GHS 95.43 in 2021 to GHS 263.28 in 2026 YTD. This indicates that customers are not only transacting more often. They are transacting at meaningfully higher values each time. 

Figure 4: Average transaction value by channel, 2021 to 2026 YTD (GHS) 

The full year-by-year breakdown: 

 
By May 2026, Hubtel had already processed GHS 29.68 billion for the operator in the first five months of the year. That is more than the entire combined value for 2022 in less than half the time. If the pace holds, 2026 will set a new record. What started as a connection between a new market entrant and a local payment processor has, over five years, become one of the largest payment operations in Ghana, and by every available measure, it is still accelerating. 

Is a Loyalty Rewards program right for your business? Every business runs on customers – loyal customers. One way to keep them coming back for more is to reward them for using your product/service.

Will Loyalty Rewards Work For Your Type of Business?

Appreciating your customers with loyalty rewards sounds like a good plan, and it is. The question is: Does your business model support this type of customer engagement/retention plan? Depending on how your business is set up, implementing this type of customer retention strategy might seem hard to do. A typical example is a real estate agent/broker. It’s not every day that people buy homes. Most of your customers may buy a house or two in their lifetime. But all the same, you can think of other creative ways to get your customers to refer you to other potential buyers. A referral is always a great way to get new customers.

What Kind of Businesses Need This Strategy?

Let’s look at another example: A fast food joint. People eat every day. So employing a loyalty rewards system can work fine for such a business. Other examples include a barber shop, restaurant, shopping mall, pharmacy, etc. Any kind of business that has returning customers will benefit well from a reward system. The amount of returns the customers make also adds up to whether or not you need to implement this customer retention/engagement strategy.

Do You Have a Way to Efficiently Implement a Rewards Program?

The biggest obstacle to running a loyalty program is implementing it. Going the old-school route and printing out loyalty cards is a pain, and often expensive. Luckily, digital loyalty reward schemes like the one included in Hubtel POS for customers of businesses remove this obstacle by making it easy to create rewards, engage customers, and keep track of your customers.

Any business that signs up on Hubtel POS has a loyalty reward system implemented automatically. All you have to do is ask your customers to provide their phone numbers at the point of sale. Once you have their number, they’ll get free points which they can redeem for airtime, internet bundle, and even mobile money after each successful sale. All this is handled by Hubtel without you lifting a finger. Sounds awesome? Sign up for a free Hubtel POS account at hubtel.com/pos and start rewarding all your customers so they keep coming back for more.

Hubtel – What We Do

We help businesses with a very easy-to-setup software to process sales in-store, online, and mobile so they can continuously delight their customers.

Hubtel.me – The Rewards Never End

You’ve probably bought airtime or internet bundle today. The question is: Did you get anything extra after making the purchase?? That’s aside from the actual internet bundle or airtime you paid for. If not, this is a chance to jump on some freebies – cash actually.

I  bet you’ve spent more than GHS100 this month alone on airtime. Unless you’re not monitoring – which you should. Plus if you bought the said airtime using the Hubtel.me app, you’d have a history of the transaction right in the app?

The Only App That Rewards You For Using It

Hubtel.me is a loyalty app from Hubtel. It gives you free loyalty points for every transaction you make on the app. These points can be redeemed for cash, internet bundle, and even mobile money. Sweet huh?
If you want to view just how much you can earn with this app for every transaction, check out the expected rewards at www.hubtel.me. See the example below. This is assuming you spend GHS100 cedis on airtime, internet bundle, mobile money, etc:

From the image above, you’ll realize there are various levels with varying expected rewards. You can easily increase your membership level based on the volume of transactions you perform in a given period. It’s a win-win situation here – perform more transactions to earn more free cash.

One interesting thing about the app is that you can still perform transactions when you have no internet access. Simply dial *711# to access the basic functions the app provides such as purchasing airtime and bundle.

Download Hubtel.me

The app is available for both Android and iPhone With Hubtel.me, the rewards never end?

Goodbye Mobile Money Fraud ?

As part of efforts to improve the security of Mobile Money payments, MTN has introduced a new way for customers to approve transactions. Starting Monday 6th August, 2018.

Customers will no longer receive prompts to enter their PIN to confirm transactions. Instead, they will have to approve the transaction themselves on their phone.

All other services which require debits on a customer’s wallet will have to go through the approval process before it can be completed.

This move is meant to help reduce the number of fraud activities that occurs regularly on Mobile Money. If this goes well, we may see a new form of added security on Mobile Money transactions. It will mean that customers will have to “intentionally approve” payment requests from a vendor or third party.

Here’s how to approve a payment request:

1. Dial *170# and select Option 10, My Wallet.
2. Select Option 2 for My Approvals.
3. Enter PIN to get your Pending Approval List.
4. Select pending transaction to approve.
5. Select Option 1 YES to approve the transaction OR Option 2 NO to reject the transaction

Customer receives an SMS as confirmation for a successful transaction.

In the past, developing USSD applications was a specialized activity that was typically performed by network engineers who had some level of professional training. Just see how many USSD developer jobs are listed on LinkedIn.

Over the last few years, banks and other large companies have deployed their USSD applications at great cost due to the engineering effort and equipment required. Until very recently, individuals and small organizations could never even dream of building their own USSD apps.

But now, something truly incredible has happened, with the end result being that:

• It’s suddenly very easy for developers to build USSD apps
• The utility of USSD has exceeded use cases far beyond what its designers originally imagined

In order for us to understand the incredibly unlikely sequence of events that took place to cause this, we must go all the way back, to the beginning of the mobile revolution.

Continue to full story…

Do you agree that hospitals can be daunting? Think about it – there are queues everywhere; right from your first step in the outpatient department, to looking for your folder, having your vital readings taken, getting to see your doctor, and then finally picking up medication at the pharmacy. In some cases, the need to be admitted or run extra recommended laboratory tests or scans without adequate financial preparation can be a punch below the belt if one has little time on their hands and can’t visit a bank.

Despite all these challenges, health institutions have one aim in mind – saving lives and improving health. Access to quality healthcare is an integral and necessary part of every nation’s development. With health care comes the need for money transfers and payments either for services or medication purchased.  Countless lives have been lost in times past due to the “cash and carry system” in our nation’s health delivery.

The desire to solve these problems and improve patient convenience with payments led healthcare providers like the Airport Women’s Hospital and Equity Pharmacy to find innovative ways to solve the challenges that come with money payments for their service. Their search led them right to Hubtel.

Augustine, the accountant of Airport Women’s Hospital cites an example of a woman who was admitted for a day and was discharged that same day but had no paper money to pay. Her ability to pay via Mobile Money saved her the cost of staying an extra day until she had access to cash. Augustine further mentions the added convenience of varying forms of payment and the ability to track all Mobile Money transactions on all networks. With Hubtel’s POS service, errors can also be eliminated by being able to first verify the client’s name before any transaction is made. With the Health and Fertility Centre just about 9 minutes drive from the Kotoka International Airport, one would have no worries about carrying paper money before being attended to, with the added benefit of payment convenience.

With an unwavering desire to provide the best customer service in health delivery, payments for services and medication has seen some innovation. A glowing example is Equity Pharmacy, a pharmacy that now boasts of a doorstep delivery service to clients as a result of signing on to Hubtel’s POS service. Clients can now send prescriptions and electronic payments and expect their medication at their chosen point of delivery. Tracking of sales made and reconciliation of accounts through Hubtel’s platform has also been easier.

At Hubtel, we take pride in our ability to rethink customer service. Now we urge you to rethink Mobile Money: it is more than just a convenient tool that saves time; it can equally save lives.

Been to the Dansoman KFC recently? They now accept any form of payment when you order your favorite chicken – whether you pay with a mobile money wallet or bank card. No need to carry cash for your next order.

KFC Marina Mall has joined the trail of businesses that use Hubtel POS to power their payments. Anyone can now order any KFC pack and pay using Mobile Money or a Ghanaian-issued Bank Card. This is good news for both KFC and their clients. Hubtel POS is a more convenient way to receive payments in your shop or store.

Imagine paying for your next KFC order using any mobile wallet or bank card. That is just how KFC receives payment now using Hubtel POS. Your customers need a better way of making payments to you in your store. Use Hubtel POS and experience a new kind of payment.

Let your customers pay you using any mobile wallet or Ghanaian-issued bank card. It is convenient for both you and your customers. Boulevard Menswear just joined the club. They accept all forms of payment because they signed up on Hubtel POS. Rethink your customers’ payment experience with Hubtel.

The time is 4:30am Monday morning and the signs on the doors of most banks in Ghana will read “Closed”. Yes, the “brick and mortar” bank at the corner of the busy road is closed, but not your mobile phone, not your telecom network, not your mobile money which you carry in your pocket wherever you go. With a smile on your face, you can stare at that sign reading “closed” and yet get the chance to transfer the funds to your son in university who needs to purchase that textbook tomorrow. Mobile money has caused a stir in traditional banking in Ghana in the last 5 to 10 years, and like it or not, its impact would be greatly felt.

Just as every new idea and improved ways of doing things comes with its own benefits and implications across various civilizations, cultures, and industries, the banking and financial sector in Ghana is currently experiencing another phase in its life through the Calvary charge of the “mobile phone” which is quickly sweeping over the country like a wildfire or a plague.

Financial inclusion: Out of every 10 Ghanaians about 4 of them have traditional bank accounts and only 3 may have their accounts active. The introduction of mobile money has given the banking industry the opportunity to reach out to the unbanked through their mobile phones. One can now open a traditional bank account even with a mobile phone. The days of needing to walk into a bank and fill out some forms are fast fading away. Currently, almost all telecom companies are making moves to synchronize one’s mobile money account with traditional banks in order to have ease of moving funds across accounts. This will expand the banking industry in terms of deposits through mobile money, and having a bank account could be as easy as dialing “1,2,3”

Cash-lite banking: Do you recall the smell of notes and money when you enter a typical banking hall? Or perhaps it is the sound of the money-counting machine. What about the “bam-bam” stamp sounds of the teller as she stamps the white band on the bank notes… All of these familiar things in traditional banks may be experienced less if mobile money continues to be successful in making the Ghanaian economy cash-lite. One may not need to carry thick wads of cash which may attract thieves as soon as one steps out of a banking hall. With the dawn of mobile money, hundreds of cedis can be wired across the nation without moving a foot. If mobile money gains more ground and capacity is built to handle bigger transactions and transfers, physical cash may exchange hands less often and traditional banks may equally be visited far less often.

General fear of unemployment: It is feared that with automation and making transactions electronic and convenient, fewer people may actually visit a traditional bank occasionally to make transfers or withdrawals. Introducing the automatic teller machine (ATM) saw a drop in walk-in clients making withdrawals. This move into automation and mobile money is speculated to cut down on the number of staff traditional banks may actually need for that aspect of operations (account opening, money transfers, and others) in the long run. However, mobile money has created thousands of employment opportunities for mobile money agents across the country. Traditional banks can equally innovate and provide core banking services to telecom firms that do not have banking as their core business. In the long run, traditional banking may move from being more staff to client related when mobile money takes over certain traditional frontline banking roles.

It is however important to note that with moves of merging mobile money accounts with traditional bank accounts through financial technology, your Mobile Money account may gradually be an extension of your traditional bank account, only this time, you will carry the “brick and mortar bank” in your pocket everywhere you go.