Africa mobile finance scene still lags behind

Despite numerous success stories outlining massive take-up of mobile financial services in Kenya, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and Uganda, African markets are "still primarily cash-based," says a new report released by a specialist mobile financial services research company on Tuesday.

Zimbabwe's Econet Wireless says its mobile money platform, EcoCash accounts for 20% of the country's gross domestic product while M-PESA says its platform accounts for about two fifths of Kenya's GDP.

However, experts now doubt the significance of these figures, saying this measure misses out on payments changing hands across the supply chain.

"GDP is simply a measure of gross value added, and therefore misses out on the many payments changing hands as inputs move through supply chains, with components bought and sold multiple times over," said the report, titled Mondato Mobile Financial Services Africa 2015 Report.

As a result of this, an d putting aside airtime top-ups and person to person transfers, the Africa region "is in a very similar position to Europe, and parts of the Americas and Asia, where MFS is not achieving levels of use that were previously forecast".

However, says the report, countries in Africa enjoy the advantage that the "greater proportion of the population has an evolving comfort for transacting over their mobiles".

Most markets in the region also have fewer alternatives compared to their European and American counterparts, a situation that experts believe will help markets "overcome consumer behaviour" obstacles.

Additionally, say the experts at Mondato, the number of registered accounts in Sub-Saharan Africa has almost doubled over a two-year period but underscores that "adoption remains very "thin" and predominantly limited to airtime top-ups and person-to person ("P2P") transfers.

SOURCE:ITWEBAFRICA