Bright Simons the IMANI Africa’s Honorary Vice President, has broken down the Zeepay unfolding saga.
Zeepay is a Ghanaian money-transfer company that lets people receive money from abroad instantly.
According to Bright Simons, Zeepay, when someone sends money to Ghana, Zeepay pays it out to the receiver right away, but the actual dollars from abroad only arrive at Zeepay 1–3 days later.
Reports suggest Zeepay was using its own money or borrowed money to bridge the gap, which created a big hole owing to banks and partners over GHS 150 million.
It will be recalled that the Bank of Ghana recently punished Zeepay for breaking some forex rules and operating with much less capital than normal banks, and they were fined Zeepay and suspended their forex license for 11 days.
Bright Simons, in his post on X, wrote, “I track Zeepay’s unfolding saga for many reasons. It is the kind of systems-level affair that, in Ghana, leaders tend to only confront at the surface level. If there are no obvious political theatre gigs, no one even bothers to report in depth. Underlying policy issues are thus never properly fixed.
I understand that around the time of the Bank of Ghana’s (BoG’s) latest regulatory action, Zeepay also came to the notice of EOCO after payment termination issues with some customers. There is a tendency in Ghana to leave complex policy issues at the doorstep of law enforcement and move on.
Zeepay represents a high-water mark of Ghanaian entrepreneurship and innovation. Founded in 2014 by Andrew Takyi-Appiah, a former banker turned serial entrepreneur, it built a footprint across 20 countries and in 2023, it reported clearing over USD 3 billion across 10 million transactions. It signed deals with big remittances players like MoneyGram and Remitly. It pioneered key steps in the “last-mile”, telco-agnostic, direct-to-wallet payments revolution in Ghana.
BoG gave it leeway to remit money from Ghana overseas, as well as other privileges that other operators claim they had been queuing for longer to get.
This success was, however, underwritten by an increasingly complex capital stack. Zeepay moved from bootstrapped beginnings to hybrid financing. Its most innovative move was the adoption of a USD 18 million shared-collateral debt facility, allowing multiple lenders to hold equal-weight claims against a common asset pool. This financial engineering enabled Zeepay to scale its liquidity rapidly to support the massive float required for instant remittances.
Doing so exposed Zeepay’s model to a “liquidity air-gap”: customers receive funds instantly (T+0), while settlement from international corridors arrives days later (T+1 to T+3). This mismatch forces Zeepay to pre-fund payouts, with scarce operational capital.
During peak volumes, exposure balloons. At one point, leading to a GHS 150 million liability to a tier-one settlement bank. The bank, having fronted liquidity via GhIPSS to preserve real-time customer experience, found itself holding unsecured credit risk. The result was a damaging litigation saga and loss of confidence.
There are also regulatory arbitrage issues. While universal banks in Ghana must maintain GHS 400 million in minimum capital, Enhanced Payment Service Providers like Zeepay operate with as little as GHS 2 million. Despite processing volumes comparable to mid-sized banks, they depend on sponsor banks’ balance sheets to absorb shocks.
Only tight infrastructure design across the ecosystem can prevent systemic blowout. So far, GhIPPS has not been up to the task. It has a weak proof-of-reserve tie-up with trust accounts, for instance.
This is not a problem that can be fixed by the likes of EOCO through opaque proceedings. There must be a serious, transparent, open policy debate involving BoG, GhIPPS, and “critical policy audiences” in Ghana, such as think tanks and the finance academy.
“Katanomics” is what I call the tendency in Ghana to fix symptoms and elevate surface success for political gain (see all the glowing reports about fintech in Ghana) rather than tackle deep policy plumbing.
Zeepay’s meteoric rise (fueled by sophisticated investors) and growing pains (with EOCO in the mix) say a lot about how the “system” will always trump innovation and entrepreneurship. We can’t “agile” around broken policy. Sooner or later, we have to grapple with it”.
See the post below:
1. I track Zeepay's unfolding saga for many reasons. It is the kind of systems-level affair that in Ghana leaders tend to only confront at surface level. If there are no obvious political theatre gigs, no one even bothers to report in depth. Underlying policy issues are thus… pic.twitter.com/9kJ2taX8r0
— Bright Simons (@BBSimons) November 27, 2025