MTN revisits mobile money space
Mobile operator MTN is set to launch another assault on the mobile money market with “renewed focus”.
In November, MTN announced a low-cost banking solution called Mobile Money, in partnership with Pick n Pay and Boxer Stores.
The service enables customers to make payments from their mobile phones and transfer funds to other users with their money account.
Karel Pienaar, CEO for MTN South Africa, told BusinessTech that he was pleased with the early progress from this service, while he also heralded the performance from the group’s mobile money operations in other African units including Uganda.
In South Africa, active mobile money subs increased to 2.9 million, MTN said. “MTN Mobile Money has also started to gain traction and we expect to see a much improved contribution in 2013.”
MTN said that, in countries like Cameroon, it continues to increase its mobile money distribution footprint, while in the Ivory Coast, mobile money revenue climbed 167%. In Uganda, the group sees 2 million transactions each month, and added 150,000 subs in January.
“With 78% of our subscriber base registered and more than 2 million transactions each month, MTN Mobile Money now contributes meaningfully to Uganda’s revenue,” it said.
Mobile money growth
Research published by the GSMA at the end of February, found that 30 million people undertook 224.2 million mobile money transactions, totalling $4.6 billion during the month of June 2012 alone.
This exceeded the 196.3 million transactions performed by Paypal customers on average each month during Q3 2012.
In its second annual Global Mobile Money Adoption Survey, the GSMA put the number of live mobile money services for the unbanked at 150, 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%, 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.
Sub-Saharan Africa
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% 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 of the region, and penetration will continue to grow, since the majority of planned deployments are also in sub-Saharan Africa.
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