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For over a decade, mobile money has been transforming access to financial services around the world. The scale of mobile moneycontinues to grow, with more than 866 million registered accounts in 90 countries and $1.3 billion transacted every day. The progress, challenges and most groundbreaking industry trends are explored in this year’s flagship report from the GSMA’s Mobile Money team.For the world’s most vulnerable, especially displaced persons and women, the benefits of mobile money are real and far reaching. Fifty-five per cent of surveyed mobile money providers have now partnered with humanitarian organisations, an initiative closely supported by our Mobile for Humanitarian Innovation programme. In August 2018, our Connected Women team released the Gender Analysis and Identification Toolkit (GAIT), a machine learning algorithm that analyses mobile usage patterns, to assist operators in reaching underserved female customers with relevant and tailored products and services.
We were also honoured to launch the GSMA Mobile Money Certification in April 2018, demonstrating the mobile industry’s commitment to bringing safe, transparent, and resilient financial services to mobile money users around the world. To date, nine providers across three continents have successfully certified, collectively covering over 133 million mobile money accounts.
The mobile money industry is now fast evolving against a backdrop of increasing internet access and smartphone adoption. Successful providers are moving towards a ‘payments as a platform approach’, expanding their value proposition to a full range of third party products and services to suit customers with diverse needs. This signals the start of a major shift in the mobile money industry, which will promote digitisation more broadly mobile money customers will not just have access to an account, but rather to a full suite of services that are relevant to their daily lives, encouraging them to keep their funds in digital form and building resilience to financial shocks.
Now more than ever, mobile’s unparalleled global scale provides a tremendous opportunity to reach the 1.7 billion people who remain financially excluded. I am pleased to have been appointed to the United Nations Secretary-General’s Task Force on Digital Financing of the Sustainable Development Goals to harness this potential, and I look forward to working closely with fellow Task Force members to unleash the power of technology and digital financing in all corners of the world.
