Western Europe and North America have the lowest rates of mobile money implementation worldwide. So says, Luke Taylor, COO of risk management and analytics expert, Neural Technologies which has found that 63% of global telcos are running one or more mobile money service, but this rate falls to just 30% in Western Europe.
The findings form part of Neural’s Telecoms Risk Management Global Survey 2016, which also features findings on operators’ attitudes to global revenue losses, IoT and OTT services. (Also see: Operators see more opportunity in IoT than OTT, says global risk management survey.)
Africa and Southeast Asia showed the highest rates of offering contactless payment services at 61% and 75% respectively, whilst Eastern European respondents reported the highest implementation of money transfer services at 67%. Global mobile phone-based money transfer, financing and microfinancing service M-Pesa, whose Africa-based services are supported by Neural Technologies, entered the Eastern European market in Romania in 2015 and expanded into Albania later in the same year.
Neural have been working in the Mobile Money arena for many years, so it is really useful to see the operators’ attitudes both regionally and globally. At the recent Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the GSMA announced that mobile money services exceeded one billion transactions in December 2015 with 100 million new registered accounts becoming active in 2015. Mobile money services are becoming an increasingly important part of the global telecoms and banking industries and we will only see it grow further in years to come.
Fraud continues to be perceived as the biggest threat from offering mobile money services. Over 80% of our respondents cited it as their primary concern. However, it was encouraging to see 45% of global respondents recognising mobile money as a channel for new services and revenues. In Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, this rose to over 50% of respondents, which gives us an indication on where these markets will be heading in the next 12 and 24 months and beyond.
In Central and Latin America, over 40% of respondents cited introducing mobile money as an opportunity to show that the operators were being innovative. Assisting The World Bank’s unbanked initiative was an opportunity for 25% of those in Central Asia, which encompassed India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, where large parts of the populations are unbanked.
To request a copy of the Survey Report, visit www.neuralt.com/globalsurvey2016
The author of this blog is Luke Taylor, CCO and deputy CEO of Neural Technologies.
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