The Product Development Manager of the Ghana Community Network Limited (GCNet), Carl Sackey has disclosed that Ghana is well positioned to significantly improve its business competitiveness through data analytics, which is crucial for strategic return on investment decision making.

Making a contribution on the subject: Envisaging The Future Of Digital Payments In Ghana during a panel discussion at the 2017 Ghana Economic Outlook and Business Strategy Conference, Mr. Sackey explained that given the emergence of disruptive technologies, companies have to rethink new payment systems in a bid to speed up processes towards a digitised economy as envisioned by the Government.

He maintained that the proper leveraging on data analytics offered a huge opportunity to bridge the revenue gap saying “GCNet is well placed and positioned to lead the way with its infrastructure to track payments and electronic transactions having built various trade related data that could be used for business intelligence for growth.”

He noted that in India for instance, disruptive technologies was changing the face of payment systems and speeding up the processes of digitisation of payments, stressing that although data mining is a relatively new term, the technology is not and continuous innovation in technology is opening up the potential for data analytics to attract the due attention from businesses and governments to enhance their operations and improve revenue.

Other panellists included the Chief Executive Officer of Margins Group of Companies, Moses Baiden and General Manager of MTN Mobile Money Limited, Eli Hini who agreed with Mr. Sackey that there was the need to fix a fundamental challenge to a digitised economy in Ghana which is the identification of all users of electronic payments channels.

Data analytics (DA) is the process of examining data sets in order to draw conclusions about the information they contain, increasingly with the aid of specialized systems and software.

It enables one to analyse data from different perspectives and summarizing it into useful information – information that can be used to help businesses increase revenues, improve operational efficiency, optimize marketing campaigns and customer service efforts, respond more quickly to emerging market trends and gain a competitive edge over rivals — all with the ultimate goal of boosting business performance.

The Ghana Economic Outlook and Business Strategy Conference (EOBS) is a full day event that brings together leading government officials, banking executives, heads of mobile telecommunication companies, policy- and decision- makers, industrial experts, civil society organisations, foreign businesses and investors, and the diplomatic community, among others, to address issues pertaining to business growth and development.

This year’s EOBS conference was on the ‘Unlocking Ghana’s Economic Potential With Mobile Money and Payment Systems’ which was addressed by the Vice President, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia.