In remarks at the Chartered Institute of Bankers Ghana’s 2025 Governor’s Day dinner, the Bank of Ghana’s governor set out the operational and supervisory changes made during 2025 to restore monetary and market discipline, tighten bank risk controls, and strengthen financial-sector infrastructure, alongside expectations for banks to rebuild capital and reduce non-performing loans (NPLs) toward a 10 percent prudential benchmark by end-2026. The review highlighted a 100-basis-point policy rate increase in March and Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) governance changes including transparent majority voting and publication of individual votes. Operational measures included recalibrating the dynamic cash reserve requirement from June, widening the policy rate corridor to ±200 basis points in September, and tightening net open position limits in October by removing allowance for net long foreign-currency positions, alongside adjustments to open market operations (OMO) including a longer-tenor sterilisation instrument and a return to the 14-day bill as the main OMO instrument. The governor linked these steps to outcomes including inflation moving from above 23 percent at the start of the year to single digits by November, cumulative cedi appreciation of over 20 percent, a cumulative 1,000-basis-point policy rate reduction over the year, and Ghana Fixed Income Market trading volumes more than doubling by October compared with the previous year. On banking-sector resilience, the remarks noted that banks below the capital threshold fell from eleven at end-2024 to five by November 2025, with remaining capital gaps expected to be closed, and set supervisory timelines for NPL reduction by end-2026, tighter governance expectations (including outsourcing, data protection, and operational resilience), and a trajectory toward Basel III-aligned macroprudential tools. The speech also described a Microfinance Sector Reform Strategy with a new institutional architecture of Microfinance Banks, Community Banks, Credit Unions, and Last Mile Providers, and plans to restructure ARB Apex Bank for a broader policy transmission and capacity-building role, alongside strengthened Anti-Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism (AML/CFT) expectations as Ghana undergoes its third Financial Action Task Force (FATF) mutual evaluation. Infrastructure updates included completion of a National Payment Systems Strategy for 2025–2029, progress on gh-link card modernisation, the start of ISO 20022 migration, new guidelines and a centralised monitoring platform for international money transfer operators, clarification of agent banking frameworks and work on agent interoperability, and passage of the Virtual Asset Service Providers Bill to underpin licensing and supervision of digital asset activities. Looking to 2026, the governor signalled a supervisory shift toward the quality of intermediation and underwriting discipline, continued focus on capital rebuilding and NPL reduction, and expectations for banks to deepen export finance and engagement with African Continental Free Trade Area opportunities. Priorities also included more forward-looking risk-based supervision with lower tolerance for repeated weaknesses, deepening and diversifying markets, continued payments and data-standards modernisation, and exploration of asset-backed digital settlement instruments such as gold-backed stablecoins where they can reduce cost and friction in intra-African trade.

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