Africa-Press – Uganda. Mobile money transactions have, for the first time crossed the one billion mark, surpassing the 954 million transactions that had been recorded in the 2020 third quarter.
This is contained in the Uganda Communications Commission Market Performance report for the fourth quarter ended December 2020. The performance, according to UCC, means that every active mobile money account at least made 15 transactions per month during the period, among which included agent-assisted deposits, mobile money-bank transfers, mobile betting, and merchant payments, among others.
Agents remained the single most important point of interface in the last mile mobile money value chain, accounting for more than 25 per cent of total mobile money transactions in the period between October and December 2020.
Of the 270 million agent-assisted transactions, 170 million were deposits while withdrawals only accounted for 100 million.
The report shows that the irregularity between withdrawals and deposits could be due to growing business-to-business applications, increasing mobile money to bank applications, and behavioral changes in light of the mobile money withdrawal tax.
During the period, mobile money penetration also increased following record net quarterly new mobile money accounts – 1.8 million – that were registered in the third quarter of 2020.
However, the fourth quarter posted subdued performance with only 325,000 new mobile money accounts, which translated into a national mobile money account total of 28 million from 27.7 million as at the end of September 2020, which translated into a penetration of 66 per cent.
The report also reported that during the period, there was an 80 per cent active ratio, which meant that four in every five mobile money accounts conducted at least one transaction in the preceding 90 days.
During the period, 22.5 million accounts out of the 28 million national tally were registered to be active while only 88,000 of the newly registered 325,000 mobile accounts were active.
