Mobile money spend in emerging markets will reach $2.37 trillion by 2029, from $1.58 trillion in 2024. Juniper Research, predicted that this growth of 51% will be driven by operators expanding their portfolios to include higher-margin advanced services, such as powering merchant payments in-store or via eCommerce, or providing international remittances.
Pivoting to advanced services will allow MFS (Mobile Financial Services) providers to reduce their reliance on revenue from P2P transactions. This will enable significant growth in operator revenue streams as offerings expand, but will require mobile money providers to build new capabilities, such as app-based service delivery and credit scoring, to facilitate this shift.
The research found that mobile money providers face major challenges in offering advanced services at scale. It identified the complexity of shifting from basic USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Service Data) services to fully app-based experiences as creating significant hurdles for mobile money providers. It recognised effective partnerships with digital wallet platform providers to increase their reach across different access channels as critical in revolutionising how services are offered.
Research co-author Mélissa Amouny explained: “As banks struggle with the distribution of financial services in emerging markets and mobile money services have excellent reach via their agent networks, partnerships between banks and mobile money services are a strong fit. MFS providers must strike partnerships with banks to offer the capabilities needed, and with platform providers to improve their technical infrastructures, to best address the advanced services opportunity.”
