Recently, we kicked off the 2015 Global Adoption Survey of Mobile Financial Services. This annual survey—which covers mobile money, mobile insurance, mobile savings and mobile credit services— captures quantitative information about the performance of mobile financial services for the unbanked across the globe.
This data is used to develop our annual global State of the Industry report (see the 2014 report). In its fifth year, the report provides the industry with a comprehensive review of mobile financial services for the unbanked. For the mobile money industry in particular, 2014 marked the achievement of several important milestones:
- The number of registered mobile money accounts globally grew to reach just under 300 million in 2014. There is still huge potential for future growth, however, as these accounts only represent 8% of mobile connections in the markets where mobile money services are available. In 2014, seven new markets joined the ranks of countries where there are more mobile money accounts than bank accounts. 16 markets now hold this status, indicating that mobile money remains a key enabler of financial inclusion.
- The industry is getting smarter about what it takes to prompt mobile money adoption: active mobile money accounts stand at 103 million as of December 2014 and an increasing number of services are reaching scale. 21 services now have more than one million active accounts.
The 2015 State of the Industry report will be released next year, at Mobile World Congress.
Participating in the Survey
Last year we had 127 respondents from 69 countries, and this year we’re hoping for even more. For their participation, all respondents receive a confidential Benchmark Report, which assesses the performance of their service against their peers at a global and regional level, and across over 20 industry indicators (see a sample Benchmark Report)
If you’d like to participate in this year’s survey and have not yet been sent the questionnaires, they are available for download in Excel format below. Please note that certain criteria must be met for services to be eligible to participate – more information on this can be found in each questionnaire.
- Mobile Money Survey
- Mobile Credit & Savings Survey
- Mobile Insurance Survey
We are asking participants to complete the survey by 15th August. This deadline is important to us as it will allow us to conduct detailed analysis and to develop deeper insights, beneficial to the industry as a whole.
Data confidentiality
As with previous surveys, data will be kept confidential; all proprietary data that is shared with us is governed by strict non-disclosure agreements. We will use this data to analyze the global and regional development of mobile financial services which target the underserved, but we will only ever publicly report figures that are aggregated or that have been completely anonymised so that the results of individual participants cannot be deduced.
If you have any questions or comments or would like to submit a survey, don’t hesitate to get in touch at mmu@gsma.com.