Special Series: “New Directions in Africa-China Studies” | Yuanwei Zong, Credit, Code, and Control: China-Backed Fin-Tech Lending in Ghana
The Spirit of a Quick Buck: Digital Lending in Ghana
“Ghana is the place to make a quick buck,” Mr. Wang told me, leaning over the roulette table at the Golden Dragon Casino in Accra. He wasn’t just referring to the game. His real bet was elsewhere—on a digital lending app targeting Ghanaian borrowers. The risks were high, and so were the returns.
Like many Chinese Financial Technology (Fin-Tech) entrepreneurs I encountered during my fieldwork in 2023, Mr. Wang had spotted a gap: widespread smartphone use, weak regulatory oversight, and millions of people without access to formal banking. Therefore, Ghana, along with many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, had become the frontier for Fin-Tech ventures. For Mr. Wang, the key principle was “make a quick buck”. More than just casual slang; it condensed a speculative mindset. “We need to move fast and make the money, before the market shuts down and the government catches up.”
The “quick buck” motto has long been a common ethos for Chinese entrepreneurs in Ghana. The country was not viewed as a place to build slowly but as a terrain for striking fast and cashing out. In the early 2000s, Chinese migrants flocked to Ghana for gold mining. Some large enterprises obtained government-issued licenses, but many more joined the illicit trade as small-scale miners—known locally as galamsey—who faced widespread accusations of resource grabbing, environmental pollution, and clashes with local authorities (Botchwey & Crawford, 2018).
At first sight, today’s Fin-Tech entrepreneurs look quite different. They wear polo shirts and Apple Watches, talk about stock markets and algorithms, and keep their operations “clean”—not leaving any dirt on the ground. Yet the impulse is familiar. Both groups are driven by the dream of making a fortune overnight, by relying on short-term, opportunistic, and extractive business models.
I began fieldwork in this space in 2023, spending time with Chinese entrepreneurs in Accra at dinners, networking events, and karaoke nights to build relationships. That was how I first met Mr. Wang—young, wealthy, always paying the bill. He liked to boast that digital lending was the new gold rush: “lucrative, but with less dirt and more data.”
Mr. Wang’s firm was just one of many. According to my estimation, more than ten Chinese-backed digital lenders were active in Ghana during my research. Some were small and barely registered, while others were affiliated with major Chinese tech companies. This article focuses on three cases: Mr. Wang’s high-interest, rapid-recovery model; Transsion’s platform-based approach, building on its smartphone market dominance; and OPay, a venture-backed giant expanding across Africa. Each case represents a different model. Taken together, they show how these financial ventures are reconfiguring China’s reach into Africa and reshaping the local financial sector and digital economy for the long run.
From Credit to Control: How Predatory Inclusion Works
Mr. Wang’s business model was simple but aggressive. His company offered unsecured microloans via a smartphone app. With a few taps and a valid ID, users could borrow between 80 and 2,000 Ghanaian cedis (roughly $8 to $200 USD). These amounts were modest by global standards but significant locally: for example, a domestic worker or security guard in Accra might earn only 500 to 1,000 cedis ($50 to $100 USD) per month.
Repayment was typically due within 7 to 30 days. Effective interest rates could exceed 1,000% per year. These costs were rarely transparent; instead, they were hidden behind user-friendly interfaces and vague fee descriptions.
Moreover, if borrowers missed a payment, they were subjected to harsh social pressure. When installing the lending app, users had to grant the company access to their phone contacts. If a loan wasn’t repaid on time, the platform would call or send messages to borrower’s friends, family, employers and pastors. Some apps even generated fake legal notices, warning of court action or arrest.
Mr. Wang was fully aware of the ethical gray area of this practice. “Everyone is doing this,” he told me. “I know it’s not nice, we are aware of it, but it works. And maybe soon the government will ban it. So, we move fast.” He understood the market as a brief, closing window of opportunity. He had even come up with an exit plan. “I’ll stay a year or two,” he said. “Then maybe go to Dubai. Or Southeast Asia. Wherever it’s still open.”
This model exemplifies what Donovan and Park (2022) call “predatory inclusion” — offering access to finance not as empowerment but as a mechanism of exploitation. Also, as Aitken (2017) writes, “all data is credit data.” These apps do more than track repayment: they collect location data, browsing habits, and even WhatsApp activity. This information feeds into algorithms that decide who receives credit and who does not. In effect, people don’t just pay with money; they also surrender their privacy and social relationships.
From China to Ghana: The Spatial Fix of Fin-Tech
Mr. Wang’s “quick buck” model is not an isolated scheme. It is embedded in the trend of financialization in the Global south. Initially, microcredit is framed as a tool of empowerment, promising to bolster the entrepreneurial capacity for families in poverty (Yunus, 1999). By the 2010s, however, scholars had discovered the dark side of the financial inclusion narrative: it spirals the debt burden and imposes new forms of discipline on everyday life (Elyachar, 2005; Karim, 2011).
Still, for Chinese Fin-Tech firms operating in Ghana, these dynamics do not just mirror broader global patterns of financialization. They also carry distinct Chinese genealogies, shaped by the rise and collapse of the online lending boom in China. As Rao (2021) documents, the online lending sector in China promised financial inclusion and innovation but collapsed in spectacular fashion. Between 2014 and 2020, thousands of platforms emerged and shut down; investors lost money, and millions of users fell heavily into debt. When the Chinese government cracked down on the business with very strict regulations, many firms had to stop operating in China and looked for opportunities abroad.
Mr. Wang’s parent company was one of them. After being blocked in China, it redirected capital, technology, and business models overseas. Ghana—with its fast-growing mobile economy and relatively weak oversight—became a new frontier. Mr. Wang’s firm was therefore not simply an instance of local opportunism but part of the global afterlife of China’s Fin-Tech crisis, reborn on a new stage. This is an emerging example of the “spatial fix” David Harvey (2006) refers to: Chinese Fin-Tech companies shift capital from markets where regulation and crisis have closed the door to those where markets remain open. It is also a case of regulatory arbitrage, of moving business to places where oversight is weaker.
These discussions about financialization and China’s online lending crisis lend context to understanding the broader patterns of the Fin-Tech business in Africa. Within this general trend, however, companies follow different paths: Mr. Wang’s “quick buck” model represents small private ventures, while Transsion’s platform strategy and OPay’s venture-backed expansion each chart their own course. Taken together, they show how Chinese Fin-Tech is reshaping Ghana’s financial sector.
Becoming the Super App: Transsion’s Platform Capitalism
If Mr. Wang represents the speculative entrepreneur, Transsion represents a different kind of Fin-Tech actor. Transsion is the Chinese company behind Tecno, Infinix, and Itel — smartphone brands that dominate African markets. By 2024, Transsion held over 50% of the smartphone market in Africa (Canalys 2025). Building on this hardware base, Transsion has expanded into digital finance, embedding financial services directly into its phones.
I first met Mr. Chen, a 30-year-old Chinese man who was the national director of Transsion’s finance department in Ghana, at the Accra Polo Club—a venue built by British colonial officials, long popular with Ghana’s elite, and now increasingly frequented by Chinese professionals. With a master’s degree in finance and prior experience at Alibaba, Mr. Chen appears as a confident corporate professional rather than an opportunistic hustler. “We’re not here for quick money,” he told me. “We’re here to become the next Alipay.”
Alipay is China’s biggest Fin-Tech platform and also the “super App” owned by IT giant Alibaba, which bundles together payments, credit, insurance, investment and savings. Transsion aims to replicate something similar in Africa. Now, every Tecno phone comes preloaded with its finance app when users buy it. It gives the company direct access to millions of users as well as access to users’ behavioral data. This app also links with a risk management system from Sweden, enabling it to construct credit-scoring models that combine transaction histories, call records, and app usage.
Unlike Mr. Wang’s app, Transsion’s loans carry lower interest rates and provide clearer fee instructions. Mr. Chen explained, “Earning money is just one of the goals. More importantly, we want to foster the usage habits of users, making our app their primary financial service platform and building long-term loyalty.” In this way, Transsion is creating not just a lending service but a human infrastructure for long-term market presence.
The contrast with Mr. Wang’s firm was clear. While Mr. Wang’s model aimed for short-term repayment, Transsion’s ambition lay in long-term engagement. Where Mr. Wang extracted value quickly, Transsion sought to entangle users gradually, capturing their value for the long term within a controlled digital ecosystem.
This is what Srnicek (2017) describes as “platform capitalism.” The loan serves only as the entry point. Once users are inside, they are seduced by other services—bill payments, online shopping, mobile games. Each action enriches their profile. The deeper the user goes, the more valuable they become to the platform.
Meanwhile, these future-focused strategies represent a new mode of financial extraction. Instead of profiting primarily from missed payments, they profit from constant data collection and user lock-in. What is being constructed is not just a financial product but a digital ecosystem where profitability depends on sustained engagement. This aligns with what Dufva and Dufva (2019) call “colonizing the future”: designing infrastructures that define what is possible, profitable, and permissible.
Spectacle and Scale: Global Capital Networks behind OPay
If Mr. Wang’s business embodies the short-term hustle of quick loans and Transsion reflects the patience of platform-building, OPay presents a third configuration: the fusion of Fin-Tech ambition with venture-backed spectacle. Backed by the Chinese IT company Kunlun Group, OPay quickly emerged across the continent as a flagship of the digital economy. Marketed as a “super app,” it bundled ride-hailing, food delivery, mobile payments, and — most profitably — microcredit. By 2021 it had raised $400 million in a SoftBank-led round, hitting a valuation of $2 billion USD (Kene-Okafor, 2021), and it went public on Nasdaq. Its glossy media campaigns depicted Africa as a “blue ocean” for innovation, positioning OPay as the face of Fin-Tech inclusion.
Yet behind this aura of innovation lay a business model built on predatory lending. Similar to other digital lending apps, OPay issued short-term, high-interest loans with minimal transparency, enforced through aggressive collection strategies. These practices — already sanctioned by Google Play — resembled the same extractive mechanics seen in Mr. Wang’s and Transsion’s operations. The crucial point is that OPay managed to carry these practices into the heart of global finance — Nasdaq, SoftBank, Silicon Valley — while keeping its narrative clean enough to pass as development.
OPay’s founder, Chinese businessman Yahui Zhou, was already infamous in Chinese Fin-Tech circles; Mr. Wang even described him as the “godfather of Asia’s grey economy.” That reputation also haunted OPay’s African venture: what appeared on the surface as a pioneering super app was also facilitated by Zhou’s expertise in navigating grey zones between legality and exploitation.
Far from being unaware, professional investors had access to detailed critiques: Hindenburg Research (2020), for instance, exposed OPay’s dependence on exploitative lending practices. What investors apparently valued, however, was not the sustainability of the business but its ability to stage scale and momentum.
This is what Anna Tsing (2000) refers to as an “economy of appearances”: where under speculative capitalism, spectacle is not incidental but constitutive. OPay excelled at performance. Advertisements portrayed smiling young Africans holding smartphones, executives appeared at international conferences, and pitch decks circulated from Beijing to Wall Street to Silicon Valley. The point was not to prove that borrowers were truly included, but to show that the platform was expanding fast enough to justify its valuation. For OPay, performance was not separate from the business model — it was the business model.
The complicity of global capital is central here. Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hong Kong, and Beijing all played roles in underwriting and circulating the money that sustained OPay’s expansion. Investors were not merely passive observers; they were participants in the very predatory system they funded. What mattered was that the story looked respectable enough and the language of innovation and poverty alleviation was convincing enough to keep capital flowing. In this sense, OPay does not simply represent an African Fin-Tech story. It exemplifies how global networks of finance collaborate with frontier actors to repackage extractive practices as development, embedding predatory inclusion within the very circuits of global capital.
OPay shows how predatory lending in Africa is not simply the outcome of Chinese speculation but a node in global financial networks. It depends on the complicity of venture capital, stock exchanges, and international investors who turn exploitative practices into investment stories. These exploitative financial products were not just local anomalies but were also sustained by transnational capital networks connecting borrowers in Ghana to global financial centers in Hong Kong and Wall Street.
Discussion and Conclusion
The three cases presented here — Mr. Wang’s short-term hustle, Transsion’s platform logic, and OPay’s venture-backed spectacle — mark a new phase in Chinese engagement with Africa. Much of the scholarship on China–Africa has emphasized state-led initiatives: highways, railways, dams, and telecom networks (Lee, 2017; Jones & Zeng, 2019). These projects are often analyzed as instruments of state interest or framed in polemical terms as “debt-trap diplomacy” (Brautigam, 2020).
The Fin-Tech sector, by contrast, looks different. It is less about state strategy and more about private entrepreneurship and speculative capital that moves through regulatory grey zones. It embeds Chinese presence in Africa in a subtle yet wide-reaching way. Mr. Wang’s company shows how small-scale entrepreneurs displaced by China’s P2P lending crash can relocate to new frontiers. Transsion demonstrates how a hardware giant can retool its market dominance into financial and human infrastructure. OPay exemplifies how African markets become stages for globally financed firms to perform scale and legitimacy. Together, these cases push us to expand the scope of Global China beyond infrastructure and trade to include financialization and digital experimentation.
The implications are mixed. On the one hand, these firms fill real gaps. Formal banking in Ghana remains limited, credit is scarce, and many people welcome the speed and convenience of mobile-based finance. On the other hand, access is conditional, costly, and often coercive. Loans came with high interest rates and forms of surveillance that invade borrowers’ social networks. In Ghana, digital lending creates new forms of dependence, tethering livelihoods to opaque scoring systems and distant investors.
Placing these developments in the frame of Global China also highlights their novelty. The micro-lending sector is not directed by Beijing or coordinated through state-owned enterprises. It is driven by private entrepreneurs and venture-backed firms that move flexibly across borders. At the same time, however, it builds on infrastructures—both material and social—established by earlier waves of Chinese presence: an opportunistic mindset, the presence of a market share of phone exports, migration networks, and telecom equipment, to name a few. It also illustrates how Chinese actors are increasingly woven into transnational financial ecologies. What appears to be a Ghanaian credit app is, in fact, an artifact of global capital, chasing margins and testing models in the new frontier of expansion.
Taken together, these cases suggest that digital lending will not be the last frontier of China’s technological expansion in Africa. On the contrary, the “going-out” initiative of Chinese tech firms moving to Africa and beyond is becoming a common direction, and more companies are likely to experiment with transferring mature products from the Chinese market or tailoring localized business models to African contexts. Whether empowering or exploitative, entrepreneurial or structural, these ventures will continue to multiply, turning Africa into both a laboratory and a marketplace for emerging digital economies. For both scholars and policymakers, the task is to recognize the divided nature of these ventures: they enable new forms of connectivity, yet they also generate new vulnerabilities. What remains as an open question is whether African societies will accept futures shaped elsewhere or claim the power to define them locally.
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Yuanwei Zong is a PhD student in Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. His research examines the China–Africa encounter through ethnographic fieldwork in Ghana, focusing on Chinese corporate culture and business practices across Sub-Saharan Africa. His broader interests include the digital economy, ICT development, fintech, cryptocurrency, and digital mining.
To cite this essay, please use the bibliographic entry suggested below:
Yuanwei Zong, “Credit, Code, and Control: China-Backed Fin-Tech Lending in Ghana,” criticalasianstudies.org Commentary Board, January 22, 2026; https://doi.org/10.52698/YVPF3622.