Page 19 - State-of-the-Industry-2013

Part 1 - mOBile mOney

TexT BOx 2
measuring the success of mobile moneY services

Comparing the performance of mobile money services is complex. It is difcult to fnd a common indicator that works for services at
diferent stages of maturity, that use diferent delivery models (over-the-counter vs. wallet-based), and which target addressable
markets of diferent sizes.

In previous years, we developed a methodology that allows us to compare the performance of mobile money services in spite of
these diferences.

In order to compare the success of mobile money deployments, we looked at their ratio of transactions to the size of the
addressable market.

TRANSACTIONS

We looked at the total number of transactions, excluding airtime top-ups, cash-ins, and cash-outs.
• We chose to measure the number of transactions rather than the number of customers so that we could accurately compare
wallet-based services and over-the-counter services.
• We did not include cash-ins and cash-outs because these transactions are often performed as a requisite frst step by customers
in order to perform other transactions in the case of wallet-based services.
• We did not include airtime top-ups as we found that this number can be strongly biased by promotions and bonuses encour-
aging customers to buy airtime via mobile money, and therefore does not accurately refect how mobile money services are
actually performing.

ADDRESSABLE MARKET
• For MNOs, we used the number of mobile subscribers as a proxy for their addressable market.

• For non-MNOs, we used the number of unique mobile subscribers in their country.

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