Mobile Money is coming to a new stage

I haven't visited the GSMA website for a long time.

Yesterday I wanted to check their latest materials on Mobile Money, but after searching for a long time, I couldn't find it easily. The entry for Mobile Money no longer existed in the main solutions pages.

I finally found the entry, but discovered that the content was updating extremely slowly.

I remember that Mobile Money was no longer in the main items of the MWC2024.

In the past years in MWC, there was a fixed topic to discuss Mobile Money and Fintech, but now it is gone.

Only the GSMA Kigali in Africa still has a topic of Mobile Money, but in MWC2024 Barcelona it was gone.

And GSMA still publishes the annual Mobile Money report every year, but actually there is nothing new in this annual report. It just repeats the growth of some numbers.

It means the Mobile money has to move to a new stage.

The Mobile Money industry has grown at an annual rate of more than 15% in the past 10 years, and has changed from rapid development to steady development.

From Safaricom M-Pesa's unique success to its global success, not only in Africa, but also in South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Latin America and other developing countries, Mobile Money has met the local people's needs for inclusive finance in the form of mobile phone numbers and wallet accounts.

We can say that Mobile Money has truly done a great thing.

Mobile Money has not only brought convenience to the lives of ordinary users, but also opened up a new path for mobile operators.

Kenya's M-Pesa's revenue accounts for more than 40% of Safaricom. In the coming years, it is estimated that it will reach 50%, which is equivalent to a mobile operator completely transformed into a Fintech company. No one could have predicted this 10 years ago. This has pointed out a new transformation path for mobile operator groups such as MTN, Vodacom, Orange in Africa, and even AM and Digicel in Latin America.

However, the mobile money also arrive to a stage, which may be bottleneck period.

Smartphones are rapidly becoming popular - traditional feature phones no longer have a market, and smartphones are already cheap enough.

Users should turn to mobile apps, but an embarrassing thing is happending. Users are still keep using USSD for more than ten years and are unable to change their user habits. It is extremely awkward to see them using USSD with their smartphones, but it also seems natural.

Is USSD very convenient? Is it more convenient than App?

In fact, the reality is that users can buy smartphones, but cannot afford data traffic. They do not use apps but use USSD on a regular basis. The root cause is that they cannot afford data traffic.

After all, USSD is free, while various apps on smartphones secretly use data traffic, which adds up to a lot of money in a month. This has been the case for many years, and this problem has not been well resolved. And of course this happened in China before.

Definitely, mobile operators can solve the problem, at least partially. Targeted free traffic or free traffic when opening apps are both possible - how internal departments in mobile operators share the revenue and how they fight is another issue.

In addition to the data traffic problem, another big reason is that the operators suddenly found that they did not know how to market the App.

The previous method of registering users for Mobile Money accounts through mass SMS and batch opening could not attract these users to download the App and use the App.

In other words, although these users are all Mobile Money users, they just don’t become to the App user. The core is that the operators’ traditional way of playing has to change to the Internet playing methods, the operators don’t know how to play it anymore - a typical case is that "China Mobile" has experience, killed a own product "Fetion" as good as Wechat.

As a result, all Mobile Money businesses are stuck here. Although everyone know there is a bright future ahead, what lies ahead is a swamp but no one has a clear idea how to get through it.

the correct way is to learn from countries that are good at using the Internet.

There are only two countries on earth that are good at using Internet apps, the United States and China.

China's mobile payment is unique in the world, so naturally we need to learn from China's leading mobile payment companies.