At closing time in Accra, Adwoa, a trader at the city’s busy Kaneshie Market, is trying to work out how much she made that day. Some customers paid in cash, others sent mobile money across different wallets, while another payment may have arrived through a bank transfer. She knows business has been good, but she has no single record that shows what she earned today, let alone what her business has generated over the past three months.

That missing record becomes a bigger problem when she needs financing to buy more stock, manage cash flow, or expand. Although her business may be healthy, the evidence of how it is performing is scattered across cash payments, mobile-money wallets, and bank accounts. Without a reliable financial history, lenders have less information with which to assess her business and may instead rely on collateral, audited accounts and other requirements that smaller or informal businesses often struggle to meet.

Adwoa's experience reflects a wider challenge for micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) across Ghana: business activity that remains largely invisible to the financial system can make viable enterprises appear riskier than they are, limiting access to suitable and affordable credit.

An MSME exhibitor showcases locally made products during the 2025 MSME Day celebrations. Photo: UNCDF.

Making invisible MSMEs visible

With funding from the UN Joint SDG Fund, UNCDF is working with UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) through the Joint Programme on Leveraging Digital Ecosystems for Increased MSMEs' Productivity. As part of this work, UNCDF’s focuses on addressing a key barrier to MSME finance: the lack of reliable financial records that financial institutions can use to assess the creditworthiness of smaller and informal businesses.

To address this gap, UNCDF has provided a small grant ($30,000) combined with technical assistance support to five financial service providers (FSPs) to develop and test approaches that use MSMEs’ business and transaction data to build financial track records and inform credit assessments. Solis Finance, one of the five FSPs, participated in a six-month human-centered design process supported by UNCDF. The process involved engaging directly with different groups of MSME users to understand how they receive, manage and record payments, and using those insights to design digital financial services around how small businesses operate.

UNCDF’s intervention informed the development of Solis’ Merchant Portal, where businesses can receive payments using mobile money, QR codes, point-of-sale devices, and payment links, while keeping track of their sales in one place. Rather than asking small business owners to create an entirely new set of financial records, the platform brings together transactions previously scattered across different payment channels, creating a more consistent record of business activity.

With UNCDF’s support, Solis is now able to use three months of transaction history to assess whether a merchant qualifies for a working-capital loan. For businesses that may lack audited accounts or conventional collateral, this provides another way to demonstrate that they are actively trading and have the capacity to repay. At the same time, it gives Solis a clearer picture of how the business is performing, allowing it to assess lending risk based on actual business activity.

Solis staff interviewing a woman poultry farmer on her farm in the Ashanti region during the research phase of the project. Photo: UNCDF.

From one transaction to a track record

Solis’ Merchant Portal started small, recording a transaction of 10 Ghanaian cedis (GHS), worth less than $1, in October 2025. Within two months following UNCDF’s financial and advisory support, sales recorded through the platform reached more than GHS 111,000 (≈$10,000). Growth continued into 2026, with the number of transactions tripling month-on-month by March.

By June 2026, the pilot had digitized GHS 2.1 million (≈ $187,000) in MSME cash transactions, brought 1,800 business owners into formal savings for the first time, and enabled Solis to provide GHS 600,000 (≈ $53,000) in working-capital loans based on merchants’ own transaction data, with 97 per cent of the loans repaid.

For FSPs, this emerging track record shows how transaction data can make businesses that have traditionally been difficult to assess more visible to lenders and provide an additional basis for credit decisions. For MSMEs, digitization acquires a much more immediate value: every transaction can contribute to a financial track record that makes the business easier to understand and, potentially, easier to finance.

Solis CEO Tony Abakisi with staff in the Solis Microfinance Office in Accra. Photo: UNCDF.

From individual businesses to a wider digital ecosystem

The results of Solis’ Merchant Portal show what can happen when one FSP is able to turn merchants’ everyday transactions into information that can inform lending decisions. Reaching many more MSMEs, however, means taking that opportunity beyond a single provider and creating a wider digital ecosystem where businesses can trade, build digital financial records, and connect to services and financing opportunities.

This is where Ghana’s MSME Digital Gateway comes in, providing a way to take this approach beyond individual financial service providers and into a wider digital ecosystem. Launched nationally in June 2026, the Gateway is a one-stop platform owned by the Ghana Enterprises Agency and developed with UNDP and the Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in ICT. It gives MSMEs access to markets, business and regulatory information, capacity-building resources, financing opportunities, and an e-commerce marketplace in one digital environment.

UNCDF plans to replicate the approach tested with Solis, by integrating Merchant Portal’s core functionalities, including digital payments and transaction-based credit assessment, into the Gateway’s e-commerce marketplace. This would enable MSMEs to trade through the Gateway to collect payments while building transaction histories through their everyday business activity. As more FSPs join the Gateway, these records could give lenders better information to assess MSMEs and connect more businesses to finance.
In this way, an approach first tested with one FSP could reach businesses across a much wider market, turning the digital activity MSMEs already generate into a financial track record that can support their access to finance.

Solis staff members interacting with the Ashanti Region Hairdressers Association as part of the research process in Phase 1. Photo: UNCDF.

Changing how risk is understood

UNCDF’s work with financial service providers is testing new ways of assessing MSMEs based on their actual business activity, using transaction data to give lenders additional information with which to assess creditworthiness and lending risk.

The Digital Gateway complements this approach by providing businesses with access to a wider digital marketplace, information and business opportunities. By connecting financial services and financial literacy to this ecosystem, UNCDF, UNDP and UNCTAD are helping turn greater digital participation into a pathway towards more accessible and affordable finance.
For a trader like Adwoa, this brings the story back to where it began. Her customers were always there, her sales were being made, and money was moving through her business every day. What was missing was a way for that activity to become a financial history that a lender could see and assess.

As more of those transactions become visible, what once looked to a lender like a business without a track record can instead become a business with months of activity behind it. This gives financial institutions better evidence with which to assess risk, and entrepreneurs like Adwoa a stronger opportunity to access the capital they need to grow.

This intervention reflects UNCDF’s approach to digital finance: from expanding access towards making underserved markets investable. A modest grant, paired with technical assistance, helped one financial service provider prove a lending model that can now be taken to scale through national infrastructure. That is the role UNCDF plays: taking on the early risk and cost of proving what works, so that MSMEs like Adwoa’s can be served on commercial terms and, over time, commercial capital takes UNCDF’s place.