The National Identification Authority (NIA) has completed building its verification platform, to enable all financial institutions to accept the Ghana Card for transactions.

Already Calbank, Stanbic and UBA have started accepting the Ghana Card as a form of verification for banking transactions.

This follows the successful onboarding of the three banks’ verification systems to the NIA platform.

All other banks have been given a grace period of up to the end of the year 2021, to build and onboard their systems to the platform and connect all their branches.

The Head of Corporate Affairs at the NIA, Mr Abudu Abdul-Ganiyu, made this known in a radio interview monitored by Graphic Online on Accra based Neat FM Thursday morning (October 14, 2021).

Many banks have not been accepting the Ghana Card as a form of verification for transactions with the explanation that they were not yet onboard the verification platform.

The banks had objected to accepting the card because they wanted a reliable way of verifying them for delayed transactions but not for real time transactions.

Mr Abdul-Ganiyu explained that the banks were not accepting the Ghana Card because they had no means of verifying the information on the cards, compared to the others like the voters ID or the driving licence as the database on the Ghana Card had not been established.

However, the processes have been completed and we have undertaken a successful pilot with Calbank.

“It went very well and currently the team is assessing the outcome before eventually rolling it and I can assure you that it will be very soon.

“Once it is accepted as the ID for the tax transactions, the process will be completed to also be in sync with bank transactions,” he emphasised.