Mobile money market to be worth $78 billion by 2019 – report

The global mobile money market will be worth $78 billion by 2019, according to research by MarketsandMarkets. The report, titled Mobile Money Market- Global Forecast to 2019, claimed the market will grow at an annual compound growth rate (CAGR) of 44.6% from last year’s total of $12.34 billion.

The research firm reckons the Middle East and Africa region is the biggest market for mobile money services. In Africa in particular there are large numbers of people who have no access to traditional banking services, and the mobile payments market is growing fast along mobile phone adoption.  But the report said it expects increased traction for mobile money services also in the APAC and North American regions within the next five years.

“The propagation of mobile devices across the globe supplemented with the ease in access to all data has extensively redefined the lifestyle of the people,” MarketsandMarkets said in a statement.

“Further, the increase in adoption of mobile financial solutions supplemented by enhanced network connectivity has extensively leveraged mobile users to conveniently accomplish their financial tasks through their mobile phone. The incorporation of advanced features incorporated within the mobile phones has enabled the Mobile Network Operators (MNOs), banks, and payment processing agents to facilitate the provision of mobile money services.”

According to MarketsandMarkets, the major vendors of mobile money solutions are Vodafone, MasterCard, Gemalto, Orange and Mahindra Comviva. These services are still largely accessed through SMS, and different transaction modes such as direct mobile billing, mobile web/wireless application protocol (WAP) payments, SIM toolkit (STK) or unstructured supplementary service data (USSD) are also widely used.

The report said NFC-enabled mobile payments and transfers are set to grow, offering more revenue-making opportunities to operators, banks, payment processing agents and platform providers alike.

Coinciding with the above news, Gemalto has announced China Telecom is to deploy its mobile NFC solution for customers in Shanghai and Beijing, enabling mobile payments for transport and smaller purchases with their smartphones.

The Gemalto NFC SIMs come embedded with 4G LTE management software, which the chip firm said will allow users to download apps with the speed of mobile broadband. “China Telecom has been Gemalto’s partner for a long time. Last year, we provided specially-designed NFC SIMs for their nationwide launch of NFC services,” said Suzanne Tong-Li, President for Greater China and Korea at Gemalto.

“With 4G FDD-LTE commercial license, they will be able to leverage the additional LTE feature of Gemalto’s SIMs to offer faster and enhanced NFC services to their customers, leading to a wider adoption of mobile contactless services across the country.”

China Telecom will use the SIMs’ multi-tenant capacity to host its own mobile payment app, BestPay, through which it offers services such as bill payment, ticketing and financial products.