The number of 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.
For the first time, the global value of daily transactions exceeded $2-billion, 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.
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 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.
The research found that the pandemic gave fresh urgency to the need for regulatory change to facilitate greater digitalisation, including the increasing of transaction limits to allow more funds to flow through mobile money in many markets.
However, the GSMA report found that, while some of the regulatory reforms made in response to the pandemic have been positive for customers and providers, the implementation and extension of fee waivers had a negative impact on mobile money providers' core revenue stream.
Regulators are strongly encouraged to work closely with the industry to ensure sustainability going forward.