Sending and receiving money through mobile has become increasingly popular. Even in emerging markets like Africa, the digitalization of money has become an everyday-thing.
In South Africa, there are many different ways to send or receive money on your mobile. Internet banking aside, many companies offer made-for-mobile money sending systems, that make sending money as easy as sending a text message.
Dashboard and World Wide Worx have recently collected data on mobile money sending in South Africa as part of a collective Mobility 2014 study.
In the survey, they questioned 1200 people. 9% of the people surveyed said that they had used mobile money sending services over the past three months.
The data also revealed South Africa‘s most popular mobile money sending system was ABSA‘s CashSend service. More than three in every ten people questioned in the survey said they used ABSA‘s CashSend. That accounts for 30.8% of the respondents.
ABSA said that more than R1 billion had been sent with their CashSend service in 2012.
Coming in in second place, was FNB‘s eWallet service. 22.4% of the people surveyed said that they use FNB‘s popular mobile money system.
Tied in third with 19.6% is M-Pesa – which is a joint initiative between Nedbank and Vodacom – along with Standard Bank‘s Instant Money service.
Nedbank has said that their M-pesa service has 1.2 million registered users to date, while Standard Bank reports more than 2 million customers on their mobile money sending service.
MTN‘s newly launched service, Mobile Money, garnered 6.5% of the respondents saying they have used the new service. According to MTN, their Mobile Money service has approximately 1 million users and that they have processed more than R1 billion in transactions since it‘s inception.
FNB also had another stake in the survey; their FNB Geopay and FNB Pay2Cell each accounted for 1.9% of the survey. FNB also has some interesting stats on their mobile money systems.
According to them, more than 2 million people received money into their eWallets since October 2009 making up more than R4 billion being sent to eWallets.
Mobile money systems are becoming increasingly popular and user friendly. The need to be able to do your banking with the touch of a (cellphone) button is ever increasing. Luckily for us, it seems as South Africa has a wide variety of systems to choose from.
Source: BusinessTech
