Is mobile banking the way of the future…?

GSMA real-time data shows that approximately 66.72% of the world’s population atleast own a cell phone. This is approximated to about 5.13 billion people as of 2019 who own a cell phone against a world population of 7.69 billion people.

Though account penetration remains unequal across regions, there is seemingly an increase in account penetration in the developing world of about 13 percent from 41 percent in 2011. This has been made possible through mobile banking. The increased use of cell phones in banking making accounts accessible to everyone who owns a cell phone. The top secret in the modern banking industry lies in the use of mobile platform in banking. Most banks have optimized their operations and made their services accessible to almost all their customers by making use of cell phones.

Africa, as a region has made significant steps in modernizing the banking industry. Banks have resulted to using mobile banking to create a vast customer base and ease banking for their customers. Kenya’s equity bank is an example of african banks making use of mobile banking to diversify banking. Through it’s eazzy suite of products; eazzy banking app, eazzynet, eazzybizz and eazzy chama, equity bank has made banking easier for its customers who have instant access to banking services at the click of a button.

By rolling out equitel sim cards, Equity bank made banking accessibe to everybody that owns a cell phone. Equitel sim card is used for both telephony and mobile banking and has been preferred by many customers. Equity bank has experienced a higher growth through the bank’s reliance on mobile banking as most of its revenue can be attributed to it’s enhanced mobile banking.

Banking is believed to be making a U-turn fom the analog mode of banking and adopting mobile banking. This in effect has led to an increase in account ownership acrross regions since banks are able to reach out to the unbanked people.