Before Hubtel 
A city that was owed more than it could collect 

Ghana’s largest metropolitan assembly collects property rates from landowners, operating permit fees from businesses, and levies from companies that put signs on buildings. The money is owed. It exists. The problem was that most of it never arrived. 

In its best year before Hubtel, the Assembly collected GHS 8.5 million. By 2023, that had fallen to GHS 5.3 million. These numbers are not explained by a shortage of people who owed money. They are explained by a collection system that could not reach them, could not track them, and could not account for what agents were doing on the field on any given day. 

The Assembly printed paper bills and sent agents across the city to distribute them door to door and business to business. When a ratepayer had cash ready, they paid to the agent. The agent goes back to the accounts office at the end of the day to have the day’s collection recorded. The cash later goes to the bank. Every step in that chain was invisible to the people running the organisation. By the time the finance team knew what had been collected that day, the day was already gone. By the time leadership had a picture of the month’s revenue, the month was already history. There was little to no way to check whether an agent had remitted everything they collected. No way to know which areas of the city had been covered. No way to see whether revenue was ahead or behind until long after it mattered. 

This chain had gaps that compounded every year. Agents collected cash that did not always make it back to the office. Business Operating Permit certificates were forged and used by ratepayers who had paid nothing, while the Assembly had no way to verify whether a certificate was genuine. Properties sat unregistered for years because a field agent had no mechanism to add a new address to the system on the spot. Businesses that should have been paying were simply never on the list. 

Annual revenue collections 2021 – 2026 

Bringing Clarity 
Giving the Assembly its first real view of its revenue 

The first thing Hubtel did was make the problem visible. 

Before any collections could improve, AMA needed a clear picture of who owed what, where the money was going, and how much was being lost at each stage of the process. That meant building a system that could capture every transaction, connect every rate payer to a record, and surface that information to the people who needed it, in real time.  

The platform covers every point in the collection journey. A field inspector now works from a mobile portal that shows their assigned area on a map and lets them navigate to specific properties, collect payment digitally, and issue a receipt on the spot. The ratepayer receives an SMS bill before the inspector arrives and can pay directly from their phone without handling cash at all. If they prefer to pay from home without any inspector involvement, they can do that through a web portal or a USSD code that works without internet access. 

At the other end, the Assembly’s leadership opens a dashboard and sees what has been collected today, by which agent, through which channel, and in which part of the city. Reconciliation that used to wait until end of day, and often end of month, now happens on demand. Every transaction carries a timestamp and the name of the person who processed it. 

The forgery problem was closed by attaching a QR code to every Business Operating Permit certificate. An inspector on the field can scan it instantly to confirm whether a certificate is genuine. Paper bills were replaced with SMS delivery to every registered ratepayer. And when an inspector finds a property or business that is not yet in the system, they can register it on the spot and bring it into the revenue base immediately. 

One part of the build stood apart from the rest. Hubtel introduced a commission and incentive engine that pays agents 10% on every collection up to GHS 5,000. The Assembly gained a motivated and active field force without spending anything extra to create one. 

The platform covers eight distinct collection and management tools, each built to close a specific gap. 

Putting Management in Control: 
From finding out to seeing it happen 

Before the platform, there was no way to know on Monday whether the agents who went out on Friday had remitted everything they collected. There was no way to know how much any one agent was bringing in, whether certain parts of the city were being covered, or whether a particular revenue line was running ahead or behind for the month. 

That changed completely. 

The Staff Portal gives the Assembly’s leadership a live feed of everything flowing in. When a payment happens, it appears. When an agent collects on the field, the collection is attributed to that agent by name. Leadership can look at the same data in real time and see who is working, where collections are concentrated, and where attention needs to go. Decisions that previously waited on a weekly report can now be made the same morning. 

Reconciliation went from an end-of-day manual process that no one could fully trust to something that runs on demand. Staff can filter by date, channel, or sub-metro and pull a full transaction report whenever they need it. The Assembly no longer has to take an agent’s word for what they collected. Every figure has a timestamp, a channel, and a name behind it. 

The Commission Engine gave the Assembly a specific management capability that had not existed before. Because every agent’s collections are recorded live, leadership can see not just how much was collected but who collected it. Both active and inactive agents became visible, and the data itself became a management tool. 

The platform also revealed something that had been happening off the record. Despite the digital infrastructure creating a full audit trail, some parties attempted to collect payments outside the system to avoid the commission mechanism. The platform made those attempts detectable, and therefore addressable, in a way that would have been impossible before. 

The operational change at each stage of the collection process: 

Pursuing Growth 
What happened when the system finally worked 

In 2025, the first full year with the platform running across all three revenue lines, the Assembly collected GHS 25.51 million. That is three times the best year it had ever recorded before Hubtel and the highest annual total in its history. 

To see what drove it, you have to look at each part of the collection operation. 

Property Rate was the biggest contributor. Collections came in at GHS 16.47 million in 2025. The Inspector Portal was the main engine. Inspector-led visits accounted for 40.71% of all Property Rate transactions in 2025. Consistent, trackable, map-navigated visits to high-value properties turned a category that had been largely unmanaged into the Assembly’s largest single source of income. 

Business Operating Permits came in at GHS 8.54 million, the highest annual total on record for that revenue line. Part of that growth came from expansion: two new sub-metros were added at the start of 2025, bringing 2,636 businesses into the system for the first time. Part came from better follow-through with businesses already registered but not yet paying. 

In June 2025, the Commission Engine was activated. Inspectors who hit their collection targets started earning. The results appeared in the monthly numbers immediately. Collections in the second half of 2025 ran consistently higher than the first half, sustained by a field force that now had a direct financial reason to keep going. Across the full year, inspector-initiated collections totaled GHS 10.42 million, 41% of everything the Assembly brought in. 

Monthly revenue collections – full year 2025 (GHS Millions) 

The pattern of who was paying also shifted. In 2024, the average transaction on the platform was worth GHS 928. In 2025, it grew to GHS 2,081. By the first five months of 2026, it had reached GHS 2,312. Higher-value ratepayers, the banks, the large commercial properties; the warehouses are now paying through the system. That is not just a revenue number. It is a sign that the platform has reach with the payers that matter most. 

In 2025, the platform also grew the Assembly’s rateable base. Field inspectors identified and registered 351 new properties, adding GHS 2.82 million to the Assembly’s expected annual collections going forward. A further 1,129 businesses were registered through field visits, adding GHS 4.93 million to the Business Operating Permit base. Every year of active enforcement not only collects revenue from the current period; it grows the pool from which future revenue can be drawn. 

By April 2026, GHS 12.41 million had been collected in four months. That is more than the Assembly collected in any full year before 2025. Property Rate collections in April 2026 were 38% ahead of April 2025. The full year is on track to reach GHS 40.2 million. 

In 2022, the Assembly’s best year, GHS 8.5 million arrived. In 2025, GHS 25.5 million. In 2026, at the current pace, GHS 40 million. The ceiling the Assembly operated under for years was not a revenue ceiling. It was a visibility ceiling. Once the Assembly could see its money, it could go and collect it. 

Before Hubtel: 

A payroll with no way to confirm who it was paying 

When a payment system processes thousands of transactions every month, the question that matters most is not whether the money moved. It is whether it moved to the right person. For an organisation running a large-scale payroll system, that question had gone unanswered for years, and the cost of leaving it unanswered had been significant. 

The system managing these payments ran on submitted lists of eligible beneficiaries. Names came in from various sources into payroll, and at the end of each cycle, money was paid to these individuals. There was no step in that process to confirm that the person on the list was a real person, that they were the right people collecting the funds, or that the account receiving the money belonged to them. 

The result of that gap was costly. Between 2018 and 2024, approximately GHS 548 million was lost to fraudulent entries and weak controls across the payment system. People with unchecked access to the central database could include names that had no legitimate claim to the funds. External contractors managing the system could modify records without formal approval. The list of beneficiaries came in as documents and spreadsheets, and there was no mechanism to catch an entry that should not have been there before the money went out. 

On the administrative side, there was no single record that could show who had been paid, where the funds had gone, or who had authorised each transaction. When questions arose about a payment, the answers required manual effort across disconnected records and still did not always produce a complete picture. 

The problem was not that the payments were wrong. The problem was that nothing in the system confirmed the right person was the one collecting them. 

Bringing Clarity: 

Building a system that knows who it is paying prior to disbursement 

Hubtel was brought in to rebuild the payroll system with identity verification at its foundation. The starting point was a simple principle: before any payment moves, the person claiming it must prove they are who the payroll says they are. 

To do that, Hubtel connected the system to Ghana’s National Identification Authority, which holds a biometric record for every registered Ghana Card holder, including a photograph taken at registration. This connection is the core of how the new system works. 

When a beneficiary logs into their portal to access their payment, the system asks for their Ghana Card number and take a live photograph of themself. That photograph is compared in real time against the image held in the NIA database. If the faces match, access is granted. If they do not match, access is denied. No human reviews the check, and no manual override exists in this new system. 

The second layer of verification applies at the point of transfer. A beneficiary can only move their money to a bank account or mobile money account registered in the same name as their Ghana Card. The money cannot be sent to a relative, a colleague, or any third party. It goes only to an account that belongs to the verified individual. Since bank and mobile money accounts in Ghana now require Ghana Card details to open, this name-matching step closes the last gap in the chain. 

On the management side, Hubtel built an admin portal that gives the institution overseeing the payroll a full view of the entire operation in real time. Every beneficiary’s record is visible, including their Ghana Card details, their allocated payment, whether they have been paid, and if they have moved their funds, the account name and number they moved it to. Nothing in the disbursement process is unrecorded. 

Hubtel integrated APIs so that funds move directly from the payroll system into recipients’ verified accounts and refreshed the organisation’s public-facing website. 

The full set of components Hubtel built: 

Putting Management in Control: 

A complete record of every payment, visible at any time 

The most immediate change the new system brought was not in how the money moved. It was in who could see where it was going 

Before the platform, tracking a disbursement required pulling information from multiple disconnected systems and reconciling it manually. There was no single place to look up whether eligible beneficiaries had received their payment, whether they had withdrawn it, or what account it had gone to. 

The current admin portal changes that. Every transaction in the system carries a full record: who has been paid, their Ghana Card details, the amount they were allocated, whether the biometric check passed, the transfer instruction and the beneficiary account name. An administrator can look up any beneficiary, any transaction, or any disbursement and get the complete picture in seconds. 

The traceability also works as a control mechanism. Because the system records every step of the verification and transfer process, it is not possible for a transaction to be completed and then disputed without a record. A beneficiary who withdrew their money cannot claim otherwise. A transfer to an account that does not match the Ghana Card name cannot be completed in the first place. 

For the first time, the organisation has a transparent system that gives them every necessary information. The scale of what goes out each month, tens of millions of cedis to tens of thousands of people, now has a management system that can account for every cedis of it. 

Pursuing Growth: 

Two months in, GHS 88.5 million out, and a payroll that finally knows who it is paying 

The system went live and ran its first two disbursement cycles within the space of two months. These are the first payments in the history of this payroll system where every single disbursement was preceded by a live biometric identity check and followed by a name-verified transfer. 

In May, we processed payments of about GHS 55 million to over 77,000 beneficiaries and about GHS 33 million to 50,000 beneficiaries in June 

Figure 1: Disbursements by payment run 

The verification architecture also has an emerging role that will become clearer over time. When beneficiaries do not collect their money within a defined period, the organisation will issue a recall notice giving them a set number of days to claim the funds. Individuals who do not respond within that window will have their unclaimed payments returned to the institution. At that point, the system will be able to identify with certainty which unclaimed amounts belong to genuine beneficiaries who simply have not yet collected, and which are funds that nobody with a verified identity ever came to claim. That distinction is what will eventually allow the institution to measure how much the verification layer has reduced unauthorised claims on the system.  

The infrastructure is in place and operating. Every payment is accountable, verifiable, and fully traceable.