A recent report from Juniper Research, entitled Mobile Money Transfer & Remittances: Domestic & International Markets 2015-2020, observed that with US social payment service Venmo now experiencing traffic worth nearly USD 1 billion per quarter, leading social media companies were now introducing their own services. Snapchat has partnered with Square to deliver a P2P offering, while Facebook launched a US-wide service just recently.
Meanwhile, the research points out that in China, both WeChat and Alipay saw astonishing spikes in person-to-person (P2P) traffic during February 2015. This was the result of result of ‘red envelope’ P2P gifting activity when WeChat users engaged in more than 3.3 billion P2P transactions in just 6 days over the Chinese New Year period.
In developing markets, the research notes that while airtime top up accounted for the largest share of transactions, there had been a significant increase in the deployment and adoption of services such as micro-lending, savings and micro-insurance. It argued that network operators were well positioned to deliver key data for risk assessment in the form of customer top-up histories, social media usage and location data, which could be subjected to analytics to provide information for credit scoring.
Other findings from the report include the fact that there are now 17 markets, the majority in sub-Saharan Africa, where the number of mobile wallets exceeds the number of banked individuals, and that service providers are expected to generate USD 2 billion from mobile money services in 2015, rising to USD 4 billion by 2018.
Juniper Research provides research and analytical services to the global hi-tech communications sector, providing consultancy, analyst reports and industry commentary.
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