The number of global registered mobile money accounts increased 12.7% to 1.21-billion in 2020 – double the previous forecast – owing to a dramatic acceleration in mobile transactions during the Covid-19 pandemic as lockdown restrictions limited access to cash and financial institutions.

The latest GSMA ‘State of the Industry Report on Mobile Money’ reveals that transaction values also grew across the board as more money circulated and was cashed in and cashed out than ever before.

Total transaction values for 2020 grew by 22% to reach $767-billion. This means that, for the first time, the global value of daily transactions exceeded $2-billion, more than double the values recorded in 2017, with expectations that this will surpass $3-billion a day by the end of 2022.

In addition, a record more than $1-billion was sent and received in the form of remittances globally every month through mobile money, driving a 65% increase in the total value of transactions to $12.7-billion in 2020.

Further, there are now over 300-million monthly active mobile money accounts, a major milestone for mobile money after growing 17% in 2020.

“While it took nearly a decade for the mobile industry to reach its first 100-million monthly active accounts, it has taken just over five years to reach another 200-million. By December 2020, 64 mobile money providers, roughly one in five, had over one-million monthly active accounts. This is up from 30 providers in 2016,” the report highlights.

In sub-Saharan Africa, the number of registered accounts increased 12% to 548-million, with 18% growth in monthly active accounts to 156-million.

The transaction volumes for the region increased 15% to 27.4-billion, with transaction values surging 23% to R490-billion.

Customers are not only using their accounts more frequently, but they are using them for new and more advanced use cases, which suggests that, increasingly, people are moving away from the margins of financial systems and leading more digital lives.

Over the past five years, the value of transactions between mobile money platforms and banks has quadrupled, reaching $68-billion in 2020, up from just $15-billion in 2015.

Consumer behaviour changes and regulators implementing more flexible know-your-customer processes and relaxing onboarding requirements to make it easier to open an account contributed to the dramatic uptake, with the fastest growth recorded in markets where governments provided significant pandemic relief to their citizens.

The report shows that many national governments distributed monetary support to individuals and businesses to minimise the economic toll of Covid-19.

The value of government-to-person payments quadrupled during the Covid-19 pandemic, with the mobile money industry working hand-in-hand with administrations and nongovernmental organisations to distribute social protection and humanitarian payments quickly, securely and efficiently to those in need.