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The Accra resident who never opened a bank account

The Accra resident who never opened a bank account
Polina Gankina
Enlightenments(Updated
8 Min read
Kwame Asante is 28 and works as a freelance motion graphics designer in Accra. He has never had a bank account and has no plans to get one. USDT covers everything he needs.
The Accra resident who never opened a bank account
KA
Kwame Asante, 28
Motion graphics designer · Accra · Ghana

 

Kwame grew up watching his parents deal with banks and found the experience unpersuasive. Long queues, minimum balance requirements, fees that appeared without explanation, and a general sense that the institution was doing you a favour by holding your money. When he started earning his own income from freelance work around age twenty, he decided to skip the whole thing.

His clients pay him in USDT. His MTN mobile data comes from a top up bought in USDT on Cryptorefills. His Netflix subscription runs off a gift card, paid the same way. When he orders food, the platform accepts mobile money, which he funds from USDT. There is no bank in this chain anywhere.

People occasionally ask him how he manages without one. His answer is usually that the question assumes a bank makes things easier, and in his experience the opposite has been true.

 

Started with mobile money
Mobile money was already how most people around him handled payments. Ghana's mobile money infrastructure is well established. He used it from the start and never needed a bank to sit behind it.
First international client paid in USDT
A studio in London commissioned a project and asked how he wanted to be paid. He had heard of USDT from a friend and said that. The payment arrived in minutes. No intermediary, no conversion delay, no fee taken out by a correspondent bank he had never heard of.
Moved mobile data top ups to crypto
MTN is his carrier. He tops up through Cryptorefills using USDT rather than converting to cedis first. Fewer steps, and the rate works in his favour compared to using an informal exchange.
Added streaming and food delivery
Netflix runs off a gift card bought in USDT each month. Food delivery platforms that need mobile money get funded from a top up he buys the same way. The only time cedis enter the picture is for things like transport or a market purchase where cash is expected.
Word spread among his network
Several friends who do similar freelance work saw his setup and moved to something close to it. None of them had strong bank relationships to begin with. For people who got paid internationally, USDT removed the question of how to receive the money at all.

 

He is not making an ideological point. A bank account would complicate the setup he has, and he has no reason to complicate it.

 

Where Kwame's USDT spending goes
Everyday essentials: connectivity, food, streaming and the occasional cash out for local spending
Mobile data 36%
Food delivery 28%
Streaming 18%
Other 18%

 

Cash still exists in his life. Markets, transport, things bought from people who are not set up for digital payments. For those he converts a small amount of USDT into cedis on a peer-to-peer basis when needed. But it is a fraction of his overall spending, and it is getting smaller as more vendors around him accept mobile money.

 

Crypto vs cash: monthly spending split
Crypto covers the large majority. Cash fills the gaps that digital payment hasn't reached yet.
80% crypto
Crypto
~80%
Cash
~20%

No bank account. The cash share covers markets and transport, and it's been shrinking.

 

0
bank accounts, ever
~80%
of spending through crypto
4+
years running onchain

 

What Kwame's setup illustrates is that the unbanked framing slightly misses the point. He isn't excluded from financial infrastructure. He chose a different one. USDT as a wallet, mobile money as a local spending layer, Cryptorefills as the bridge between the two. That's a complete financial life, and it runs without a bank account as a prerequisite.

He does think about what happens as he earns more. Larger sums, property, anything that requires formal financial history will probably require some engagement with a bank eventually. But at 28, on a freelance income that arrives reliably in USDT and covers what he needs, that question remains somewhere in the future.

 

 

For now the setup works, and he sees no reason to change it. The bank queue his parents used to stand in on Saturday mornings is not something he has any interest in joining.