Out of the global 1.35 billion registered mobile money accounts, Sub-Saharan Africa stands the highest with a whopping 605 million accounts over and above other regions with $403 billion in transactions value as at end of 2021, MoneyTransfers.com has reported.
Sub-Saharan Africa is followed by East Asia & Pacific with 328 million accounts, South Asia with 283 million accounts and the Middle East & North Africa with 59 million accounts, while Latin America & Caribbean and Europe & Central Asia have 49 and 22 million accounts respectively.
This growth in mobile money adoption represents an 18% increase from 2020 when there were more than 1.5 million person-to-person (P2P) hourly transactions – a 22-fold increase since 2012.
Despite this increase, Jonathan Merry, CEO of MoneyTransfers believes a lot still needs to be done, saying West Africa is still proliferating, with a 60% increase in transaction value since 2020. “Despite the new milestone, mobile money is still used in low- and middle-income states. North America is still missing from the dataset. Europe has the lowest transaction value among the regions listed,” Jonathan argued.
He noted that the mobile phone is arguably the most disruptive gadget. Apart from revolutionizing the way we interact, it is changing how we access and manage our finances, among others. The ubiquity of mobile money services is helping attain financial inclusion, streamlining payments and providing users greater freedoms over their funds. Is it any wonder that their adoption is booming?” he asked rhetorically.