Page 18 - State-of-the-Industry-2013

State OF the induStry 2013

70% … and increased investments

mobile money is clearly becoming a strategically important service for a growing number of provid-

of providers are ers. this is evidenced by the fact that almost three-quarters of survey respondents plan to increase
their investment in mobile money next year, while only 7% intend to make reductions (see fgure 3). as
planning to increase
their investments in mobile money is now becoming a mainstream service for mnOs, providers will need to fnd new ways to
mobile money in 2014 diferentiate their services to stay relevant.

Figure 3
PlanneD investments in mobile moneY for 2014

7%
17%

INVEST LESS NExT yEAR
23% INVEST ABOUT THE
SAME NExT yEAR

INVEST UP TO 20%
15% MORE NExT yEAR
INVEST UP TO 50%
MORE NExT yEAR
INVEST 50% OR MORE
NExT yEAR

38%

More services growing fast

Over the last couple of years, the industry’s performance has clearly been two-tiered, with a group of very fast-growing services, and
a second group of services which were struggling to gain traction. the two graphs in fgures 4 and 5 illustrate the performance of the
mobile money industry globally. the horizontal axis represents time since launch (in number of months) and the vertical axis shows the
ratio of transactions to the size of the addressable market (read text box 2 for more information on how we measure the performance of
mobile money services).

What does the mobile money landscape look like in 2013? In 2013, we have seen more variations in the performance of mobile money
services. In particular:
• We identifed new fast-growing services in 2013.

• there is a new group of services in the “middle ground”, showing more moderate growth trends than the sprinters from 2012, but
signifcantly higher levels of adoption than the slow-growing services.

• Some previously slow-growing services have started to be widely adopted and enjoyed solid growth.
• On the other hand, some services that grew quickly in 2011 and 2012 began to stagnate or saw adoption levels drop due to publical-
ly-acknowledged incidents of fraud or technical challenges with their platform.

What does it mean for the mobile money industry? First, an increasing number of services are overcoming operational hurdles associated
with the distribution of mobile money and its adoption, which is very encouraging. Second, it is now clear that growth trends can move in
either direction—an extremely important development for the industry. in particular, this demonstrates that mobile money can be successful
even in markets where it struggled initially, and that it is possible for a slow-growing mobile money service to become a sprinter.

in the next few months, mmu will be profling a number of mobile money services to reveal the key factors behind their growth in 2013.

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