Visualizing Africa’s Lead in Mobile Money Adoption

Part 4 of the Speak Out Series: Exploring Africa’s Dominance in Mobile Money Adoption and Visualizing Global Trends.

A close-up of my data visualization. Image source: Behance

In Part 2 of the series, I visualized data on unbanked individuals in the top 20 countries of the world based on the latest Global Findex report. It visualization showed that even though unbanked individuals were dispersed throughout the world regardless of geographical regions and income levels of their countries, the highest concentration was found in seven countries namely China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, and Mexico.

In this part, we will look at how mobile money accounts are becoming popular and are disrupting traditional banking. A mobile money account is a mobile device-based money transfer and payment service. Mobile money accounts appear to be a promising and growing financial service that allows people to make transactions, receive and transfer funds and even send payments using their mobile phones. Mobile money accounts are also popular among individuals who don’t have a bank or access to a traditional branch where they can make deposits and withdrawals conveniently. This can include people who live far away from the nearest bank branch or in rural areas where such services are rare. As discussed in Part 3, mobile wallets have seen some major success in developing countries.

· The data visualization
  ∘ First chart
  ∘ Second chart
  ∘ The complete visualization
  ∘ The data
  ∘ Analysis
  ∘ Summing up

The data visualization

First chart

In this visualization, I present how the number of registered mobile money accounts has increased from around 750 million in 2017 to over 1.35 billion in 2021 worldwide. It shows that Sub-Saharan Africa clearly takes a lead through this time period.

The data for the above chart was taken from the GSMA’s Global Mobile Money Metrics website. The data was compiled in Google Sheets and the chart was designed using Adobe Illustrator.

Second chart

I also wanted to compare the registered accounts with the total population in each region to analyze the percentage of the population in each region with the highest mobile money adoption rate. For the second chart, the latest population data (2020) was taken from the World Bank Open Data.

The complete visualization

Screenshot of my data viz. Image source: Behance

The data

Analysis

Compared to just 15% of the global population, more than 45% of the people in Sub-Saharan Africa have a mobile money account. Another interesting finding is the lowest uptake of mobile money accounts in Europe and Central Asia. One possible explanation is that in high-income European countries, most adults already own a traditional bank account, and about 55% save formally in a financial institution. However, this can be misleading as the data masks differences across subregions. Many in Central Asia are still unbanked. The reasons are similar to those discussed in Part 1.

Summing up

Inclusive financial systems provide people with greater access to resources to assist them in meeting their financial needs and dealing with financial shocks. Difficulty in accessing these financial services can exacerbate income inequality and slow economic growth. Mobile money can drive financial inclusion. The above data shows that people are interested in adopting technology to avail of financial services. This will give countries a reason to consider regulating digital solutions to bank the unbanked. The above analysis can also prove helpful for fintech giants and startups, and FSPs looking to expand their businesses to other regions and leverage new consumer-centric products and services for their new markets.