KEY INSIGHTS
Mobile money has been on the rise for decades now, growing at over 25% annually during the past five years and exceeding the historic mark of 1bn registered accounts.
While the majority of today's customers still comes from Africa (e.g. Sub-Saharan Africa with 45% of all registered users in 2019), the focus of growth is rapidly shifting towards East-Asia and Pacific.
During the current COVID-19 crisis, mobile money has yet again proven its tremendous potential, being a life-line for many people in emerging markets and a means to upkeep vital economic activity, even during times of lockdown. While large parts of the economy have been negatively affected, mobile money is likely to even benefit due to faster growth and higher adoption rates.
Telcos are ideally positioned to capitalize on the continued growth, thanks to existing technological infrastructure and broad customer base. Many African telcos are already generating over 20% of their revenues, and an even greater share of their profits from mobile money. And they continue to push sales, deploying dedicated sales teams, superior prepaid recharge conditions and, most importantly, building diverse ecosystems.
Given mobile money’s broad reach and variety applications, it is attractive to a host of potential ecosystem partners, including merchants, employers, governments, banks, and even other telcos. Partners do not just benefit from mobile money's ease of use (e.g. safe, secure, and all accounted for payments), but can also use the system to sell own products and services, having access to a whole new range of customers.
For MNO, it is critical to invest in such ecosystems, starting with the technological platform (e.g. by building powerful API ) right to the active acquisition and management of partners.
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1) API (Application programming interface) is a computing interface designed to facilitate the interactions between multiple software intermediaries.