GSMA’s Mobile Money for the Unbanked (MMU) programme is releasing the findings of the 2012 Global Mobile Money Adoption Survey. MMU gathered data from 78 mobile money service providers, to create what we believe to be the most comprehensive assessment of mobile money for the unbanked services available today. With the 2012 Adoption Survey, we are able to share deeper insights on not only the number of mobile money customers, but also on how customers are using these services. In addition, we have taken a closer look at how the fastest growing deployments are positioning and managing mobile money to meet the needs of their customers.
The mobile money industry is continuing to grow rapidly…
The research shows impressive growth in the number of active mobile money users; in 2012, we counted approximately 30m active mobile money customers, who undertook over 220 million transactions totaling $4.6 billion in transaction value during the month of June 2012.
An increasing number of deployments are achieving significant scale. We identified six services with more than 1m active customer accounts, and in the last 12 months, three of them have crossed the 1 million ‘active customers’ threshold. The number of active customer accounts is now growing significantly faster than the number of registered customer accounts at the global level.
… especially in Sub-Saharan Africa
Of the 150 live deployments globally, 56% of them are in Sub-Saharan Africa. Mobile money services are already available in 34 of the 47 countries in this region and the majority of planned deployments are also in Sub-Saharan Africa. In June 2012, there were twice as many mobile money users than Facebook users in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Mobile money is contributing significantly to financial inclusion
The data we collected give an interesting insight into the contribution of mobile money to financial inclusion globally. 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.
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