How we get our figures
Every number on this site comes from a document its issuer published. Where something is not published, the page says so rather than filling the gap. This explains how that works in practice — and where we have got it wrong.
Where the figures come from
Bank of Ghana
Treasury bill tender results, Annual Percentage Rate returns filed by every bank, daily interbank exchange rates, and the daily Ghana Gold Coin pricing circulars.
Ghana Stock Exchange
Monthly market reports — share prices, index levels, volumes, and each licensed dealing member's share of value and volume traded.
Securities and Exchange Commission
Registers of licensed fund managers, broker-dealers and collective investment schemes.
Fund managers and banks
Their own published factsheets, rate cards and terms, cited by document and date.
How the pages are read
Provider websites are read by a program that follows each site’s own navigation rather than guessing addresses. It identifies itself as CedafinBot, links to this page, and honours robots.txt where a site publishes one.
Some sites refuse anything that is not a browser. Where that happens we do not disguise the reader to get past it — a person opens the page instead, and the figure is recorded as read by hand. Republic Bank’s mortgage rates, the only published ones in Ghana, were read that way.
Nothing is extracted by a language model. Figures are read by deterministic parsing, so the same document gives the same answer every time and a wrong number is a fault rather than a plausible guess.
What counts as verified
A figure appears on this site only when we hold the document it came from and can name the date it was true. Not a press report of a figure, not a number quoted on a third-party page, and not an estimate.
The consequence is visible everywhere. Most of the funds we have catalogued publish too little for us to show their full cost, and they are listed with the fields blank. That is not a gap we are hiding — it is the policy working, and closing it depends on managers publishing more than they currently do.
What happens when nothing is published
The field stays blank and the page says why. “Not published” is itself information: an investor deciding between two brokers learns something real from the fact that neither states a commission rate.
We do not fill gaps with sector averages, with figures from a similar product, or with numbers a provider gave verbally. If we cannot cite it, we do not show it.
Why a series and not a snapshot
A figure read once and written up is a report. Several Ghanaian outlets have reported the lending spread that appears on this site, and they were right to.
What we do is different in kind rather than degree. The regulators publish monthly; we extract on a schedule, hold what comes back as data, and keep it comparable across categories and periods. That means a question nobody thought to ask when a report was written can still be answered — how a charge has moved over eighteen months, whether the gap between an advertised rate and its true cost is widening, which of two funds was dearer in a period neither advertises.
It also means the figures here go stale visibly rather than quietly. A report is right on the day it is published and silently wrong afterwards. A dated series says when it was last true.
Dates, and why every figure carries one
Rates move. Treasury bills change weekly, the gold premium daily, fund charges rarely. A figure without a date is a claim about now that was true at some point in the past, and it ages silently.
So every figure is dated, and articles containing rate-sensitive numbers carry the date those numbers were taken, with a link to the page holding the current version.
Corrections
Corrections are free, applied the same day, and made whether or not the provider asks. If a figure here is wrong, tell us and we will fix it rather than defend it.
What we do not do
- We do not charge to be listed. No provider can pay to appear, to rank higher, or to have a figure removed.
- We do not give advice. Telling you which product suits your circumstances is a personal recommendation and requires a licence from the Securities and Exchange Commission, which we do not hold. We compare what things cost and what they have done.
- We do not sell advertising beside the comparisons. Articles may carry a labelled sponsor. The comparison pages, the matching flows and the listings carry none, and will not.
- We do not estimate. A plausible number is still a made-up one.
If we have something wrong about you
Send the correction and the document it comes from. We will publish it beside your name, cited and dated, at no cost — and we would rather be corrected than be wrong.