According to the GSM Association’s Global Mobile Money Adoption Survey, the mobile money industry continued to expand last year, with 150 live mobile money services launched for the unbanked, 41 of which were introduced in 2012.

In addition, the industry is also becoming increasingly competitive, with 40 markets having at least two different mobile money services available. The report also highlights that over 30 million people undertook 224.2 million transactions, totaling $4.6 billion during the month of June 2012 alone.

As per the report, there were 81.8 million global registered customers and the total number of global deployments increased by almost 38 per cent. The report identified six services with more than 1 million active customer accounts and in the last 12 months, three of these services have crossed the 1 million active customers’ threshold. The number of active customer accounts is now growing rapidly, as per the report.

There are 56.9 million registered customers in sub-Saharan Africa and in June 2012, there were twice as many mobile money users as Facebook users in the region. In terms of geographical spread, more than half of all countries in sub-Saharan Africa have live deployments and 37 per cent of the 166 mobile networks operators in the region have already launched mobile money. Mobile money services are available in 34 of the 47 countries in the region and penetration will continue to grow in the region, since the majority of planned deployments are also in sub-Saharan Africa.

The research also found that there are now more mobile money accounts than bank accounts in Kenya, Madagascar, Tanzania and Uganda, and more mobile money agent outlets than bank branches in at least 28 countries. With over 520,000 registered agent outlets, there are now as many mobile money outlets as Western Union points of sale. Furthermore, in some countries, the total value of mobile money transactions is equivalent to a significant proportion of the country’s overall GDP; in June 2012, it was equivalent to more than 60 per cent of GDP in Kenya, more than 30 per cent of GDP in Tanzania, and more than 20 per cent of GDP in Uganda.