From zero to GHS 162B: how a pan-African betting company built its entire Ghana payment operation on Hubtel

Before Hubtel 

A betting company entering Ghana with no payment infrastructure 

A leading pan-African sports betting company entered the Ghanaian market with a strong product and a large customer base already built across other African markets. What they did not have was a way to collect money or pay money out to their customers. 

In the betting industry, a customer usually deposits money into their account, places a bet, and if they win, expects to receive their winnings quickly. Those two actions, depositing and withdrawing, are the core of the business. If either of them fails, even for a few minutes, the customer notices immediately and the business stands at risk of losing trust. The faster the event, the faster the expectation. A customer watching a live match and trying to place a bet has very little tolerance for payment glitches. 

Finding a payment processor that could handle that kind of volume in Ghana was paramount. The company needed a partner that could process deposits at very high speed, disburse winnings just as fast, and hold up reliably during the peak moments when thousands of customers are active at the same time.  

They also needed payment channels that reached all their customers, not just those with smartphones or bank accounts. Customers who did not have smartphones needed a USSD code to transact. Any payment solution that worked only for smartphone users would leave a fraction of the market unreachable. 

Hubtel was the first payment processor the company worked with in Ghana. There was no existing infrastructure to migrate from. The entire payment operation was built from a standing start. 

Bringing Clarity 

Building the payment infrastructure the business needed to operate 

Hubtel connected the two core payment flows the business runs on. The Receive Money API handles customer deposits: a customer adds funds to their betting account using mobile money or bank, and the transaction is confirmed instantly. The Send Money API handles disbursements: when a customer wins a bet, the winnings are sent directly to their mobile money. Both APIs were exactly what the business needed to handle the speed and volume that a live betting operation demands.  

We also provided a USSD payment channel to reach customers who did not use smartphones. A customer can deposit into their account by dialing a short code, without needing internet access. 

On top of the payment channels, we provided a set of supporting services. An SMS and Notification API to deliver one-time passwords, transaction confirmations, and campaign messages to customers. A Balance Query API lets the operator check account balances programmatically. A Transfer API moves funds between accounts. A Merchant Dashboard gives the operator’s team a view of transaction activity across all channels in one place. 

The demands placed on this infrastructure were significant from the start. Betting transactions usually arrive in bursts, concentrated around major fixtures and live events. During a Champions League evening or a major African competition, the volume of deposit and withdrawal requests rises sharply in a very short window. Building infrastructure that could absorb those spikes without slowing down or failing required Hubtel to invest deeply in the reliability and capacity of its payment platform. The infrastructure we provided to serve this business became the most capable version of its payment systems at that point in time. 

The solutions Hubtel provides to the operator: 

Putting Management in Control 

Reliability as the foundation of a high-volume operation 

For a business that processes transactions around major sporting events, the most important thing a payment platform can provide is not just speed. It is consistency. A system that works well most of the time but fails during the moments of highest demand is not a system a betting operator can build on. 

The Merchant Dashboard gives the operator’s team a real-time view of what is flowing in and out across all payment channels. Deposits, disbursements, transaction counts, and channel performance are visible in one place. When a live event is driving high volumes, the team can see what is happening on the dashboard as it happens, rather than finding out after the fact. 

Five years on, we have processed 2.98 billion successful transactions. The word successful in that figure carries operational weight. It means the vast majority of what customers have tried to do has worked. 

Pursuing Growth: 

Five years, GHS 162 billion, and a record set every year 

In 2021, Hubtel processed GHS 5.94 billion in combined transaction value for the operator across all payment channels. In 2025, that figure was GHS 52.53 billion. From one year to the next, across every year in the dataset, the total has grown. 

Figure 1: Combined transaction value processed by Hubtel, 2021 to 2026 YTD (GHS Billions) 

The growth was steepest in the early years. Combined transaction value grew 122% in 2022 and 96% in 2023. These were the years in which the operator established its full commercial scale in Ghana, building a customer base and a volume of activity that has continued to grow since. 

By 2025, we had processed GHS 28.88 billion in deposits alone across 625.1 million transactions. That is an average of more than 1.7 million deposit transactions every single day of the year. The Send Money API processed GHS 23.65 billion in the same year, distributing winnings to customers across 100 million individual disbursements. 

Figure 2: Receive Money and Send Money volumes by year, 2021 to 2026 YTD (GHS Billions) 

Transaction volumes tell the same story from a different angle. On the Receive Money API, the number of deposit transactions grew from 204.6 million in 2021 to 625.1 million in 2025. On the Send Money API, disbursement transactions grew from 28.1 million to 100 million over the same period. Together, both API processed 725 million transactions in 2025 alone. 

Figure 3: Transaction volume by channel, 2021 to 2026 YTD (Millions) 

In 2021, the average Receive Money transaction per customer was worth GHS 15.91. By the first five months of 2026, it had grown to GHS 53.22. On the Send Money API, the average disbursement grew from GHS 95.43 in 2021 to GHS 263.28 in 2026 YTD. This indicates that customers are not only transacting more often. They are transacting at meaningfully higher values each time. 

Figure 4: Average transaction value by channel, 2021 to 2026 YTD (GHS) 

The full year-by-year breakdown: 

 
By May 2026, Hubtel had already processed GHS 29.68 billion for the operator in the first five months of the year. That is more than the entire combined value for 2022 in less than half the time. If the pace holds, 2026 will set a new record. What started as a connection between a new market entrant and a local payment processor has, over five years, become one of the largest payment operations in Ghana, and by every available measure, it is still accelerating.