The Record in Numbers
Mobile money just crossed a landmark the industry has chased for two decades. According to the GSMA State of the Industry Report on Mobile Money 2026, total global transaction value reached USD 2 trillion in 2025 — doubling the 2021 figure in just four years after the industry spent twenty years reaching its first trillion.
Africa is not a participant in this story. Africa is the story. Sub-Saharan Africa processed $1.4 trillion, representing 66% of global transaction value, while hosting 52% of the world’s 2.3 billion registered mobile money accounts. The continent also processed 92 billion of the world’s 125 billion mobile money transactions — a 74% share of global volume.
East Africa leads within the continent with $806 billion in transaction value across 537 million accounts, driven by Kenya’s M-Pesa and the deep penetration of mobile financial services across Tanzania, Uganda, and Ethiopia. West Africa follows with $498 billion and 517 million accounts, fuelled by Orange Money and MTN Mobile Money across Francophone markets. In stark contrast, North Africa posted just $15 billion across 30 million accounts — a fraction that highlights how uneven the continental story actually is.
Four new mobile money services launched in Africa during 2025: Cashtel in Burundi, Bede in Sudan, Wave in Cameroon, and Gozem Money in Togo. Africa now hosts 187 of the world’s 347 active mobile money services. The infrastructure is scaling. But scale without sustained usage is not financial inclusion — it is a ledger full of dormant accounts.
The dormancy figure is the one that should concern policymakers, fintechs, and investors in equal measure. Of the 2.3 billion registered accounts globally, only 593 million are active on a 30-day basis — a monthly usage rate of 25.7%, the highest recorded since 2021, but still meaning that roughly 1.7 billion accounts sit idle. In Africa specifically, 347 million of the continent’s 1.2 billion accounts are 30-day active — approximately 28% of the total. The gap between registration and active use is not closing at scale.
Why 1.7 Billion Accounts Go Dark
The GSMA data and independent analysis point to four overlapping causes, none of which are easily resolved through product iteration alone.
Fraud and security failures erode trust faster than onboarding rebuilds it. According to weetracker’s analysis of the GSMA 2026 report, identity fraud affects 90% of mobile money providers and social engineering schemes impact 88% of them. Africa loses an estimated $4 billion annually to financial cybercrime, with Kenya alone experiencing approximately $883 million in online theft losses in 2023. A user who loses funds once — or hears from a neighbour who did — rarely returns to mobile money voluntarily.
Transaction taxes introduce friction at the exact moment of use. In Cameroon, Mali, and Senegal, governments have imposed levies on mobile money transfers, pushing cost-sensitive users back toward cash. Ghana’s experience is illustrative: the country’s e-levy, introduced in 2022, depressed mobile money usage measurably before it was abolished in April 2025. The lesson — that pricing friction at the transaction level kills the habits that sustain active accounts — has not yet been applied uniformly across the continent.
Gender disparity is structural, not incidental. The GSMA found that women in 7 of 10 surveyed countries are less likely to use their mobile money accounts on a monthly basis than men, even controlling for ownership. In Uganda, 29% of male account owners used mobile loans compared to 16% of women. In Pakistan the gap is 63 percentage points. Women are registered; they are not retained. Products designed for men’s usage patterns — merchant payments at formal retail, cross-border remittances — do not map to the economic contexts where women are most active: informal markets, savings groups, household expenses.
Interoperability is limited, and remittance costs remain far above the UN target. When a mobile money wallet cannot send funds to another operator’s wallet, or when a bank transfer to a mobile account is manual and slow, users rationally keep balances in cash. Bank-to-mobile transfers did rise 37% in 2025, a structural improvement. But cross-border remittance costs averaged 8.78% of transaction value globally — nearly three times the 3% target set by the UN Sustainable Development Goals. At that cost, the international corridors that could drive daily-use habits for migrant workers remain uneconomical.
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What Operators and Fintechs Should Do Now
The active-usage gap is a product problem, a trust problem, and a policy problem simultaneously. Operators, fintechs, and investors who approach only one dimension will accelerate headline metrics while failing on the real measure: sustained daily engagement.
1. Build Fraud Detection as a User-Facing Feature, Not a Backend Filter
The instinct in most mobile money engineering teams is to treat fraud detection as invisible infrastructure — the customer shouldn’t see it. That instinct is wrong in trust-deficit markets. When 90% of providers are affected by identity fraud, the consumer knows fraud exists. Making your fraud detection visible — “we blocked 12 suspicious transactions on your account this month” — converts a backend capability into a retention signal. Singapore’s DBS Bank and Kenya’s Safaricom both run proactive fraud alert SMS campaigns that explicitly attribute prevented losses to security systems. Users who receive these alerts show measurably higher 90-day retention. The mobile money industry’s next loyalty programme is not cashback — it is proof of protection, surfaced at the moment the user checks their balance.
2. Design Products for Women’s Economic Contexts, Not Men’s
The 16-to-29-percentage-point gender gap in mobile loan usage in Uganda is not a marketing problem. It reflects a product-market mismatch: mobile loans are calibrated for working-capital needs in formal employment, with repayment schedules tied to monthly payroll cycles. Women-led household economies operate on daily or weekly cycles, involve smaller transaction sizes, and are embedded in savings-group (tontine/chama) structures that mobile wallets currently cannot replicate. The operators that are growing active female users — including Wave in Senegal and Equity Bank in Kenya — do so by building group savings features, enabling peer-to-peer contributions to shared goals, and offering micro-credit in amounts that match the informal economy’s actual denominations. This is a product architecture decision, not a gender initiative.
3. Lobby Hard Against Transaction Taxes — With Data
Ghana’s reversal of its e-levy in April 2025 was driven by a documented collapse in active accounts and transaction volumes that the government’s own revenue ministry could not ignore. Operators in Cameroon, Mali, and Senegal have the same evidence available — and have largely failed to deploy it as systematic policy advocacy. The GSMA’s finding that over 60% of providers report favorable interoperability and consumer protection regulations suggests that regulatory environments are responsive to evidence-based engagement. Operators should invest in quarterly impact reporting that makes the active-account cost of transaction taxes quantifiable, legible, and attributable to specific policy decisions — and share that data with finance ministries before budget seasons, not after.
4. Treat Interoperability as a Commercial Expansion Strategy
The 37% rise in bank-to-mobile transfers in 2025 was not the result of regulators mandating interoperability. It was the result of commercial agreements between banks and mobile operators who recognised that account linkage drove usage on both sides. The next round of interoperability expansion — operator-to-operator, cross-border, wallet-to-merchant point-of-sale — will follow the same logic: it grows the addressable use case, which grows daily active usage, which grows the economics for all participants. Operators who treat interoperability as a threat to market share are defending a dormant account; operators who treat it as a distribution channel are building a daily habit.
The Bigger Picture: Registration Was Never the Goal
The USD 2 trillion milestone is real and meaningful. It demonstrates that mobile money has become critical financial infrastructure across much of the developing world — processing more transaction value than the GDP of most African nations. But the 25.7% monthly active rate is not a footnote to this success: it is the primary constraint on what mobile money can actually deliver.
Financial inclusion, in its meaningful form, is not a registered account. It is a person who uses a financial service regularly enough that it changes their economic behaviour — how they save, how they borrow, how they receive payments, how they absorb shocks. The 1.7 billion dormant accounts represent 1.7 billion people who touched the financial system and then returned to cash. Understanding why they left — fraud, cost, friction, irrelevant products, policy-induced penalty — is not a research exercise for next year’s GSMA report. It is the product roadmap that determines whether mobile money’s second trillion is actually inclusive or merely large.
The industry has a decade of registration data. The next decade’s competitive advantage will belong to the operators and fintechs who build the systems, products, and policy environments that make active usage the default — not the exception.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did mobile money transactions double so quickly between 2021 and 2025?
The doubling from $1 trillion to $2 trillion in four years reflects three parallel tailwinds: the post-COVID acceleration of digital payments as cash became perceived as a health risk, the rapid expansion of merchant payment acceptance points across Sub-Saharan Africa, and the rise of bank-to-mobile interoperability (up 37% in 2025) which made mobile wallets useful for a wider range of transactions. The first trillion took roughly two decades to accumulate; the second came four times faster because the infrastructure — agent networks, smartphone penetration, regulatory frameworks — was already in place.
What is causing 1.7 billion mobile money accounts to remain dormant?
The GSMA 2026 report and independent analysis point to four primary causes: fraud and security failures (identity fraud affects 90% of providers, eroding user trust after a single negative experience), transaction taxes in markets like Cameroon and Senegal that make digital payments more expensive than cash, gender-product mismatch (products calibrated for formal employment cycles do not serve women’s informal economy contexts), and limited interoperability that makes wallets less useful when value cannot easily flow across operators or to banks. These causes are mutually reinforcing — a user who distrusts security and faces transaction fees has little incentive to overcome interoperability friction.
How does North Africa compare to Sub-Saharan Africa in mobile money adoption?
The gap is substantial. Sub-Saharan Africa processed $1.4 trillion in mobile money transactions in 2025 across roughly 1.17 billion registered accounts, driven by East Africa ($806 billion) and West Africa ($498 billion). North Africa, by contrast, posted $15 billion across 30 million accounts — roughly 1% of the transaction value on 2.5% of the accounts. The disparity reflects different market structures: North African banking penetration is higher, mobile network operator licensing frameworks are more restrictive, and the informal economy that drove M-Pesa’s growth is structurally different. Countries like Algeria and Morocco are starting from a different baseline, which means the East African playbook does not transfer directly.
Sources & Further Reading
- Further Reading
- Mobile money accounted for $2 trillion in transactions in 2025 — GSMA
- $1.4T flowed through mobile money in Sub-Saharan Africa in 2025 — Connecting Africa
- Mobile Money Africa Inactivity: GSMA Report 2026 — Weetracker
- Africa accounts for two-thirds of global mobile money flows in 2025 — Ecofin Agency
