According to GSMA’s Global Mobile Money Adoption Survey, in 2012 there were 30 million active Mobile Money customers globally. As per the report, more than 30 million people undertook 224.2 million transactions totalling $4.6 billion during the month of June 2012 alone.
This exceeds the 196.3 million transactions performed by Paypal customers on average each month during Q3 2012. The study demonstrates that the mobile money industry continues to expand at an unparalleled rate, with 150 live mobile money services for the unbanked, 41 of which were launched in 2012. In addition, the industry is also becoming increasingly competitive, with 40 markets identified as having at least two different mobile money services available.
The report counted 81.8 million registered customers globally and with the total number of deployments on a global basis growing by almost 38 per cent, an increasing number of deployments are also achieving significant scale. 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.
“The social impact of mobile money is already well documented, and our report last year offered the first global benchmarks on how many customers were using mobile money,” said Chris Locke , Managing Director, GSMA Mobile for Development. “Following our second Mobile Money Adoption Survey, we are able to share deeper insights on the number of customers, on how customers are actually using the service and, perhaps more importantly, on how successful operators are positioning and managing mobile money to meet the needs of those customers.”
