Bank of Ghana urges COCLAB to build a coordinated enforcement response to unlicensed financial operators ahead of the GIABA mutual evaluation

In a keynote address to the Committee for Cooperation Between Law Enforcement Agencies and the Banking Community (COCLAB) Technical Committee workshop, the Bank of Ghana highlighted the growing threat from unlicensed financial entities exploiting digital channels and fragmented oversight, and called for stronger multi-stakeholder coordination to protect consumers and financial integrity. The Bank pointed to more than 50 complaints received in 2024 concerning unregulated savings, investment and lending schemes, and described practices including punitive terms, abusive recovery methods and data-privacy violations. It noted that these actors often market across traditional and social media, offer bank-like products without licences, and disburse and recover funds through mobile money platforms, complicating enforcement across mandates. While public warnings and enforcement actions have been taken and arrests made in collaboration with the Economic and Organised Crime Office (EOCO), the address argued that persistence of the problem requires deeper intelligence sharing and more structured coordination, including multi-agency working groups and elevating selected COCLAB engagements to Heads of Institutions level. The call for a more coordinated national response was linked to Ghana’s third-round Mutual Evaluation by the Inter-Governmental Action Group Against Money Laundering in West Africa (GIABA) scheduled for the first quarter of 2026, where effective inter-agency cooperation will be relevant to assessment under international AML/CFT standards.