Unbanked - Challenges for DeFi from Mobile Money

(There’s narrative: bring DeFi to unbanked - but are they really so unbanked?)

- more than $2 billion being transacted every day in mobile money, expected - $3 billion a day by the end of 2022

- 1.2 billion registered accounts, 12.7% growth in 2020

- 300 million monthly active accounts

- International remittances - growth 65% in 2020, over $1 billion / month

- $2.3 billion/ month in merchant payments in 2020 (digital payments - $4.4 trillion in 2020)

- transactions between mobile money platforms and banks - $68 billion in 2020 ( up from just $15 billion in 2015)

- 310 live services in 96 countries - available in most markets where access to financial services is low

- 1st world to 3rd: PayPal’s money transfer service, Xoom, launches international remittance payments from users in the UK, USA, Canada and Europe to mobile money wallets across key markets in Africa.

- regulators on pandemic: waiving transaction fees, making KYC and on-boarding requirements more flexible, declaring mobile money providers and agents an essential service, maintaining liquidity for agents and enabling government social transfers to be disbursed directly to mobile money wallets

- ATMs are rare, what’s with liquidity?

a total of $189 billion or over $500 million a day digitized via mobile money agent networks

there are 5.2 million unique agent outlets globally

- adjacent services:

Savings groups: They are typically comprised of 15 to 25 self-selected individuals who cooperate to build pools of assets that can be used for lending to other members on mutually agreed terms. There are currently 750,000 savings groups in 73 countries with over 15 million members, predominantly women

credit: In June 2020, the value of loans disbursed by responding mobile money providers was $423 million.

insurance: There are 130 mobile-enabled insurance services in 28 countries, with over half offering coverage for life and funeral or health and hospitalisation services. In 2020, 43 million policies were issued, two-thirds of which (29 million) were life and health insurance policies.

Conclusion: Hoskinson and co have a lot to do