Telecom Lead @ Mobile World Congress 2013: GSMA says mobile money transactions have overtaken Paypal.
GSMA said more than 30 million mobile money users undertook 224.2 million transactions totalling $4.6 billion in June 2012.
This — announced by GSMA at the ongoing Mobile World Congress 2013 — exceeds the 196.3 million transactions performed by Paypal customers on average each month during Q3 2012.
READ Mobile World Congress 2013 HERE
GSMA’s Global Mobile Money Adoption Survey says 150 live mobile money services are existing for the unbanked, 41 of which were launched in 2012.
40 markets have been identified with at least two different mobile money services.
The report counted 81.8 million registered customers globally and with the total number of deployments on a global basis growing by almost 38 percent.
The report identified six services with more than 1 million active customer accounts and in the last 12 months, three of these services have crossed the 1 million active customers threshold.
The number of active customer accounts is now growing rapidly which is a positive sign indicating that customers are realising the benefits from mobile money services.
There are 56.9 million registered customers in sub-Saharan Africa and in June 2012, there were twice as many mobile money users as Facebook users in the region.
In terms of geographical spread, more than half of all countries in sub-Saharan Africa have live deployments and 37 per cent of the 166 mobile networks operators in the region have already launched mobile money.
Mobile money services are available in 34 of the 47 countries in the region and penetration will continue to grow in the region, since the majority of planned deployments are also in sub-Saharan Africa.
There are now more mobile money accounts than bank accounts in Kenya, Madagascar, Tanzania and Uganda, and more mobile money agent outlets than bank branches in at least 28 countries.
With over 520,000 registered agent outlets, there are now as many mobile money outlets as Western Union points of sale.
Further, in some countries, the total value of mobile money transactions is equivalent to a significant proportion of the country’s overall GDP; in June 2012, it was equivalent to more than 60 per cent of GDP in Kenya, more than 30 per cent of GDP in Tanzania, and more than 20 per cent of GDP in Uganda.
