A lot of talk has been going on about how soon it will be till Ghana gets access to payment options that work outside of Ghana. In mid-2013, PayPal opened up its services to a host of African countries, Ghana excluded. We sobbed.

Amidst the various campaigns and petitions, PayPal seems a bit too busy to care about the cry of Ghanaians. However, also in Ghana is a budding payments processing platform, MPower Payments platform, jointly run by Encodev Labs and SMSGH.

MPower Payments is a complete end-to-end online and mobile payment solution for consumers and merchants. MPower offers various payment options that allow you to send and receive money by integrating seamlessly with your preferred mobile or digital wallets, and bank accounts. The web and mobile versions come with a built-in feature known as CornerShop which is convenient for airtime purchases and payments of bills for several utility services.

MPower has come a long way over the years, helping Ghanaians to pay for services and send money across the various mobile money systems in Ghana. Back story: MTN first introduced Mobile Money in Ghana, then Tigo and Airtel followed. Just about a month ago, Vodafone introduced Vodafone Cash and Airtel introduced its Tap-To-Pay systems. Considering that these three telecom networks are powering the mobile money system in Ghana, MPower Payments’ presence helps customers to send mobile money across these networks easily.

Another major helpful feature that MPower supports is to top up your MPower wallet via a debit card. This has been an issue since most of banks charge transactional fees when you make such top-ups. And now it’s free! About two weeks ago, MPower announced to customers that topping up via their debit card is now free.

This has been received favorably and helps make the barrier to adoption almost non-existent. In effect, you can now send mobile money to another mobile money subscriber for free even if you’re not a registered mobile money user. This initially attracted a charge of 5%.

Later last week, the CTO of MPower Payments made an announcement which will excite most developers who use MPower Payments – they now have Slack integrations. So much has been talked about Slack’s success and secret sauce and its ease of use, I need not say more. This integration will make it way easier to track payments, without having to comb through SMS and emails.

For a product that needs a lot of user-friendliness and education in the customer journey to be adopted, these subtle but important changes will surely increase its adoption now that Ghana doesn’t have any “internationally acclaimed” payment options in place. This a good one from the folks at MPower Payments.