African Mobile Money revenues to hit $3b

APRIL 03,2014.

AGENCY REPORT.

Mobile Money operators’ revenue will rise to $3 billion by 2015, a study by Pyramid Research has shown. Although Safaricom’s M-Pesa in Kenya has long been the lone success story in the mobile money universe, successes are being recorded in Nigeria, Uganda and Tanzania with similar mobile money offerings.

MTN Uganda’s Mobile Money service accounts for three per cent of all airtime sold on its networ­k, and Vodacom’s M-Pesa service in Tanzania currently has six million subscribers with exponential growth of 600 per cent experienced in the past year alone.

Currently, mobile money offerings remain limited and are concentrated in just 22 of the more than 50 African countries.

Analysts said the African mobile money market has the potential to grow to a money-making market, but operators, banks and regulators need to work toward developing an enabling environment for business models that meet service providers’ revenue demands.