On Tuesday, GSMA Director General Anne Bouverot shared some preliminary insights into MMU’s 2013 Global Mobile Money Adoption Survey in her keynote speech at GSMA NFC & Mobile Money Summit in New York.
“Mobile money represents the biggest opportunity to increase financial inclusion in emerging markets”, she said. Initial findings underscore the critical role of mobile and mobile operators in driving the adoption of convenient and affordable financial services among unbanked and under-banked individuals around the world.
There are over 200 live mobile money deployments globally
A couple of weeks ago, the industry passed the threshold of 200 mobile money deployments globally. There are now 208 services currently live in 83 countries, compared to 178 in 74 countries at the end of 2012. The lion’s share of deployments is in Sub-Saharan Africa, 53% of all live mobile money deployments and one third of those planned. However, we expect this percentage to fall below 50% within the next year as 60% of planned deployments are outside of the region. With 19 planned mobile money launches, Latin America is the region with the second largest number of planned deployments.
Mobile money is becoming a mainstream service for MNOs
The mobile money landscape is becoming increasingly competitive. The majority of deployments that were launched in 2013 are in markets where there were already mobile money services available. Mobile money was deployed in nine new markets in 2013 and there are now 51 markets which have two or more mobile money services, compared to just 40 at the end of 2012 and 33 at the end of 2011. 24 markets have three services or more.
Mobile money is now becoming a mainstream service for MNOs rather than a differentiator and this is especially true in Sub-Saharan Africa where mobile money is already available in 36 out of 47 countries in the region.
Nine mobile money services have more than 1 million active users
Preliminary findings from the MMU 2013 Adoption Survey also show that the adoption of mobile money services by customers is rising and that an increasing number of services are reaching scale. We have identified three mobile money services which have passed the bar of 1 million active users between June 2012 and June 2013. Globally, 9 services already have more than 1 million active users.
GSMA adds a mobile money section to GSMA Intelligence website
GSMA Intelligence is a powerful platform for mobile industry data with over 13 million data points, updated daily. Today, we are excited to announce a new section dedicated to mobile money. Initial findings and insights from MMU Adoption Survey are available on this site. Over the next few months, we will be adding more mobile money data points to the GSMA Intelligence platform, so stay tuned!
The full results from the 2013 Mobile Money Adoption Survey will be published at the GSMA Mobile World Congress 2014 in Barcelona.
Read the press release here.
For questions on the survey or if you wish to be part of it, please contact us at mmu@gsma.com