CGAP have released a very interesting article on customer activity rates for mobile money schemes which contains some condemning statistics for the industry. Of the 120 deployments that were live globally when the study was conducted only 11 had more than 200,000 active users, and active is broadly (perhaps generously?) defined as one transaction within the last 90 days. Some other figures of note:

• Only 8% of signed-up customers were active in the survey

• 80% of those active in month 1 were not active by month 3

• The top 10% of agents had customer activity rates 40 times greater than the lowest 10%

• 44% of customers are using the service for just one activity, despite others being available

• Women are 40% more likely to use the service than men.

Killian Clifford – Director, Mobile Money Consulting, UK,noted that this “This confirms that signing customers up in only half the battle. “