Numbers Part 17: Mobile Money

Just found a few numbers on mobile money users and thought it worth sharing:

• The market for mobile applications, or apps, will become "as big as the internet", peaking at 10 million apps in 2020 according to Symbian.

• CGAP produced a recent survey on Financial Access and found that there are 6.2 billion bank accounts worldwide - more than one for every person on the planet - except that 70% of adults in developing countries do not use formal financial services, or are unbanked, compared to 20% of those in developed countries.

• Of the 139 countries that CGAP surveyed, only 40 reported that they encourage or mandate government transfers through the banking system; 14 of these are high-income countries and 10 countries in Latin America. Few countries in other regions are promoting such transfers.

• The survey predicts that the mobile payments market could be worth as much as £365 billion by 2013, with 110 million users in Europe alone by 2014.

• By the year 2012 CGAP and GSMA estimate there will be 1.7 billion people with a mobile phone but not a bank account and as many as 364 million unbanked people could be reached by agent-networked banking through mobile phones.

• CGAP estimate that mobile financial services to poor people in emerging economies will increase from nothing to $5 billion in 2012.

• 40% of Kenyan households have used M-PESA as of late 2008, a figure announced by Caroline Pulver of FSD Kenya as she unveiled the findings of their survey (see pdf)

• 41% of Filipino mobile money users were able to set up a mobile money account in 5 minutes or less.

• Electronic payments deliver cost savings of at least 1% of a country’s GDP when compared to paper, according to Visa.

• Monitise, the mobile money network, has just signed up their millionth
  customer and are processing 25 million transactions per annum.

The Finanser is sponsored by VocaLink and Cisco:
  
For details of sponsorship email us.