According to Juniper Research, the global revenues from mobile money transfers is expected to grow from $2 billion revenues forecast in 2015 to $4 billion annually by 2018.

At present, Africa is the leading mobile money market in the world. African mobile operators such as Vodacom Tanzania and MTN Uganda are generating more than 10 per cent of their revenues from mobile money. Safaricom MPESA service clocked mobile money revenues of more than $330 million in 2014.

The research firm states that the key drivers for growth in both transaction volumes and values for mobile money transfer are increased deployment of both cross-border and intra-national remittance interoperability. In addition, recent mobile money deals between Safaricom and MTN for the Rwanda-Kenya corridor and by national interoperability agreements in markets such as Tanzania and Pakistan are also boosting mobile money market.

Juniper Research underlines that majority of telecom service providers are seeking to deploy smartphone applications in tandem with unstructured supplementary service data or interactive voice response mobile money solutions.

The research firm concludes that despite significant growth in the number and value of mobile money transfers, a number of low adoption cases are emerging on account of poor business decision making by service providers. For example, in Nigeria, a number of services failed to gain repeat usage because of the high cash-out fees, while savings accounts in other markets had withdrawal fees that were inappropriate for low-income users and savers.