Tanzania, Ghana, and Uganda will be the next drivers of high growth in the mobile money sector, Citi Group reveals in a report on the evolution of mobile money service in the world. Along with Kenya, these countries rank among the top 10 in terms of the penetration rate of this payment service (40% to 70%).

Though the penetration rate is high in these countries, there is still room for remarkable growth due to important volumes of cash payments and poor competition of the other payment solutions. This is no more the case for Kenya where mobile money penetration rate and use is so high that the growth prospect is modest.

Nigeria and Egypt could be an interesting market for payment solutions via mobile but, for Citi Group analysts, their economies constitute a puzzle for investors in the sector.

In Nigeria for instance, many challenges affect the proper functioning of this business. For instance, there is the requirement to work in partnership with a commercial bank. This measure greatly affects the margin. There is also the complexity of the process for mobile money exploitation licenses and low inter-operability between the telecommunications companies. For Egypt, apart from the requirement to partner with a bank, limits on daily mobile money transactions constitute an obstacle for the sector.

This analysis shed a new light on the sector where the myriad of opportunities presented seems not to usually account for the specificities of some markets. With 320 million active mobile money subscribers, Africa will have to be patient for its next step in the development of mobile money.

Some experts remind that efforts will have to be made in terms of regulation notably, in order to duplicate the same success as in Kenya and reach the same generalization level reached in China where 500 million residents use mobile money in almost all of their daily financial transactions.

Idriss Linge