The Mobile Money for the Unbanked Tracker

The GSMA published data on deployments of mobile money for the unbanked solutions. The emphasis on this collection is that only data of sites that are actually live and in production will be published. The tool is available here. This is a big step forward as it ignores all the claims and future deployments, but focuses on what is in production today. The document lists 61 deployments. I thought that I would highlight some statistics on these 61 sites, as documented here:

• The majority of the implementations are in Africa (52%), with Asia Pacific a close second (38%).
• Ghana, Kenya, Somalia and Tanzania all boast three deployments, while India, Pakistan and South Africa have four each.
• The oldest deployment still in production is Celpay in Zambia (2001), with 56% of the deployments done since January 2009.
• Of the large operator groups, only two claim more than five deployments (Zain with seven and MTN with five)
• The technology that drives the deployments are supplied by a number of vendors (Fundamo (10) and Utiba (6) are biggest.)

Based on my knowledge of the space, I believe that the real number of serious production deployments is closer to 45. Nevertheless, interesting reading.