For merchants · Ghana pilot, 2026
A tag on yourcounter. Nothingto plug in.
No terminal to buy, no card reader, no till integration, no monthly hardware to keep charged. Your customer brings the phone. You bring a counter and a number that receives SMS.
What you get
Six things, andnone of themneed power.
The whole merchant side is a sticker, a phone number and a web page. That is not a simplification for the website: it is the design.
A tag for the counter
Passive: no battery, no power, no network of its own, nothing to plug in and nothing to charge overnight. It sits where a QR sticker would sit and does a great deal more.
An SMS for every payment
To you and to your customer. It is the notification, not the record: a network can delay a message, so the SMS is what you feel in your pocket and the dashboard is what you rely on.
A dashboard that reconciles
Every transaction, filterable by date, with amounts held as whole pesewas rather than rounded currency. This is the record of truth, and it is the one to check when a customer says they paid.
A printable statement
For a date range you choose, laid out to be printed and handed to whoever is asking. Built for a paper filing system, because that is what most shops actually run on.
A fraud trail
Every tap on your tag is logged, accepted or refused, with the reason and the time. If somebody is probing your counter, it is written down before anyone notices.
A tag you can cancel
If a tag goes missing, it is revoked centrally. A customer who taps the old one sees your name and a line saying the tag is cancelled, with no way to pay through it.
The two money questions
What it costs,and who holdsthe money.
Neither of these is settled, so neither of them is written down here yet. An empty box is worth more than a plausible number we have not committed to.
To supply — Pricing
To supply — Settlement and payout
Settlement is the most important question a merchant will ask, and it is the one this project has not finished answering.
The payout arrangement is unresolved. There is no payout path to merchants in the system today, and the licensing route that governs who is allowed to hold funds in the middle is an open question we are working through rather than one we have settled. Operating as a payment service provider in Ghana requires authorisation under the Payment Systems and Services Act 2019 (Act 987), and Tap2MoMo does not hold one.
You will get the answer in writing, in full, before you are asked to sign anything or to put a tag on your counter. If it is not good enough for you, that is a completely reasonable place to stop, and we would rather you stopped there than three months in.
What the pilot asks
Four things,and one of themis honesty.
A pilot is a two-way arrangement. This is our half of it, stated before you agree to anything rather than discovered afterwards.
- 01
A counter the tag can live on
A fixed, visible spot at the point where people pay: the counter itself, or the pump housing at a filling station. The tag needs somewhere permanent, not somewhere it gets moved every evening.
- 02
A phone that receives SMS
One number, held by somebody who is there during trading hours. It does not need to be a smartphone and it does not need NFC. The merchant side of this product asks nothing of your hardware.
- 03
Patience with a pilot
This is not a finished service and joining early means living with that. Expect things to be slower to fix than they would be from a company that had been running for five years, because we have not been.
- 04
Telling us when it fails
The single most valuable thing a pilot merchant can give us. A customer who tapped and got a screen you did not understand is worth more to this product than ten payments that went through. We would rather hear it bluntly than not at all.
What could go wrong
The failure modes,before you meetthem at the till.
A customer whose phone has no NFC
They cannot tap, and for the pilot they pay the way they do today. Most Android phones sold in Ghana in recent years have NFC and every iPhone from the XS onward does, but some do not, and that customer is not served by this.
No coverage where you trade
The tag needs no network, but your customer’s phone does. In a spot with no data coverage at all the payment cannot complete, and the screen says so instead of appearing to succeed.
A payment that stalls midway
The mobile money network sometimes takes the request and goes quiet. The system treats an unreachable provider as unknown rather than as a failure, so a payment in that state shows as pending rather than as money you did not get.
The pilot not continuing
It is a pilot. It may not become a product, the licensing route may take longer than we expect, or the economics may not work at the volumes we can reach. If that happens you will hear it from us directly and early.
None of these are hypothetical worries we invented to look candid. They are the four things most likely to make a pilot merchant’s week worse, and we would rather you read them here than learn them with a customer waiting.
Joining
Put a tag onyour counter.
We are selecting pilot merchants now, starting with pharmacies and filling stations: counters with a queue, where the tag has somewhere permanent to live. Tell us where you trade and we will tell you plainly what we can and cannot do yet.