Boku, a mobile payments company, has recently published a study indicating that more than half the world’s population will be using a mobile wallet by 2025. At the moment mobile wallet usage is at around the 2.7 billion mark, but in four year’s time it could be 4.8 billion.
Usage is growing fastest in Southeast Asia, which has shown a 25.5% CAGR and an expected overall growth of 311% in the next five years. E-commerce is driving this growth alongside app such as Grab and Gojek, and the biggest rise in numbers of users is in the Philippines and Indonesia.
Southeast Asia is followed in growth terms by Latin America, Africa and the Middle East. Growth is particularly high in those areas where wallets offer access to financial services for the unbanked. In Africa and the Middle East, usage of mobile wallets is expected to grow by 166% and 147%, respectively, by 2025. Growth in both these regions is being catalysed by the increasing usage of mobile money services, such as M-Pesa, which are offering improved access to e-commerce.
In those world regions where people already have relatively easy access to financial services, such as in North America and Western Europe, the growth in mobile wallet use is much slower. Uptake is only expected to be 65% (North America) and 50% (Western Europe) by 2025.
Nevertheless, markets such as the UK are seeing a spike in card-based mobile wallets, due to the adoption of contactless spurred on by the pandemic, and Boku believes that three quarters of Europeans will be using a digital wallet by 2025.
“We are witnessing a paradigm shift in payments driven by mobile wallets,” says Jon Prideaux, CEO at Boku. “Mobile wallets have lowered the barrier to making digital payments and ushered billions of new consumers into e-commerce. These consumers are not in North America or Western Europe, they are in emerging markets, and while they don’t have credit cards, they overwhelmingly have mobile wallets. For global merchants, mobile payment acceptance is not about accepting one type of mobile wallet or another, but ensuring that consumers in every market will have the required selection on payment types in order to monetize transactions.”