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Sub-Saharan Africa Rules The World For Mobile Money Use

Sub-Saharan Africa Rules The World For Mobile Money Use

The number of active mobile money accounts exceeds 100 million worldwide, and sub-Saharan Africa accounts for more than half (53 percent) of them, Niyi Aderibigbe reports in VenturesAfrica.

A new model for remittances that uses mobile money for both sending and receiving helped sharply drive up the number of remittances in 2014, according to the France-based GSMA (Global System for Mobile Communications Association). The GSMA made the announcement at the Mobile World Congress, now underway in Barcelona.

The global remittance market is worth $550 billion and international remittances are one of the main sources of incoming funds using mobile money, VenturesAfrica reports.

“Cash is increasingly becoming an obsolete technology as the developing world sprints ahead of the developed in its adoption of mobile money,” said Ismail Ahmed, founder and CEO of Worldremit in a VenturesAfrica interview.

An international remittance company, Worldremit recently raised $100 million to enable users to transfer money from 50 countries to 117 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Rapid growth of mobile money services is one of “the biggest enlargements of participation in the global financial system ever,” Ahmed told VenturesAfrica.