What happens when 340 million adults who have never held a bank account get a smartphone for the first time? According to the GSMA’s 2025 State of the Industry Report on Mobile Money, that question stopped being hypothetical in 2024. Across Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, 340 million new smartphone users came online, and mobile money platforms were the first financial service most of them used.
The Mobile Money Numbers
Mobile money accounts globally reached 1.75 billion in 2025, up from 1.6 billion in 2024, according to GSMA. Daily transaction values hit $4.5 billion. In Sub-Saharan Africa alone, mobile money processed $912 billion in 2025, more than the GDP of all but two African nations.
The story is not just volume. It is velocity. In Kenya, M-Pesa processes an average transaction in under two seconds. In Bangladesh, bKash handles 14 million transactions per day. In Indonesia, GoPay and OVO combined process $38 billion annually in a market where 66% of the adult population did not have a bank account five years ago.
Fintech is expanding financial access for over 1.7 billion unbanked adults worldwide, but the specific mechanism varies by region. In Africa, it is mobile money. In India, it is UPI-linked bank accounts. In Southeast Asia, it is super-apps that combine payments, lending, and insurance into a single platform.
Why Smartphones Changed the Equation
Feature phones supported basic mobile money through USSD codes. M-Pesa launched on feature phones in 2007. But smartphones allow far more. They support app-based interfaces, biometric authentication, QR code payments, and in-app lending. The cost of entry-level smartphones has dropped to $30 in many markets, according to Counterpoint Research.
That price drop matters. When a smartphone costs $30 and a basic savings account at a traditional bank requires a $50 minimum deposit plus documentation that many informal workers cannot provide, the phone becomes the bank. Digital wallet usage has reached more than 4 billion users worldwide, and the fastest growth is in markets where physical banking infrastructure is thin.
India illustrates the infrastructure effect. The Jan Dhan program opened 520 million bank accounts. But the real shift came when UPI connected those accounts to smartphones. UPI processed 117 billion transactions in 2025, according to the National Payments Corporation of India. The average transaction size was $7. These are not large purchases. They are daily expenses: bus fares, vegetable vendors, phone top-ups.
What New Users Do First
The first financial product most new mobile money users adopt is person-to-person transfers. Sending money to family members, splitting costs with neighbors, paying informal workers. The World Bank’s Global Findex Database shows that 62% of first-time mobile money users cite domestic remittances as their primary use case.
Savings come second. M-Pesa’s M-Shwari product, a mobile savings and microloan service, has 35 million active users. Average deposit size is $12. The product pays 6.5% annual interest, well above the 1.2% offered by Kenya’s largest commercial banks on comparable accounts.
Lending follows savings. Once a platform has six months of transaction data on a user, it can build a credit profile. Over 30,000 fintech companies now operate worldwide, and many of the fastest-growing are micro-lenders serving users with thin credit files in emerging markets. Tala, which operates in Kenya, the Philippines, Mexico, and India, has disbursed $5 billion in microloans since its founding. Its average loan size is $35.
The Revenue Opportunity
For fintech companies and mobile network operators, each new smartphone user represents a multi-product revenue stream. A user who starts with P2P transfers may eventually use bill payments, micro-insurance, savings, and credit. McKinsey estimated in a 2025 report that Africa’s fintech market could generate $30 billion in annual revenue by 2028, up from $6.6 billion in 2023.
The largest prizes are in markets where bank branch coverage is lowest. Nigeria has 6.6 bank branches per 100,000 adults, compared to 30 in the United States. Fintech startups are expanding rapidly across emerging markets precisely because the gap between demand and supply is widest there.
MTN Mobile Money, the largest mobile money platform in Africa, reported $22.5 billion in transaction volume in Q4 2025 alone. Safaricom’s M-Pesa division generated $1.1 billion in revenue in fiscal year 2025, a 17% increase. These are not speculative businesses. They are profitable, scaled, and growing.
Barriers That Remain
Connectivity is uneven. The ITU estimates that 2.6 billion people still lack internet access, and most of them are in the same regions where financial exclusion is highest. Mobile money works on feature phones via USSD, but smartphone-based products require data connections.
Regulatory frameworks vary widely. Tanzania caps mobile money transaction sizes. India limits wallet balances for non-KYC users to $24. Nigeria briefly banned mobile money agents in certain states before reversing course. Fintech adoption rates surpass 64% globally, but in markets with restrictive regulations, adoption lags behind.
Fraud is also a constraint. The GSMA reported that mobile money fraud losses in Sub-Saharan Africa reached $1.2 billion in 2025, mostly from SIM swap attacks and social engineering. Platforms are responding with biometric verification and transaction monitoring, but the cost of fraud prevention cuts into margins on small-value transactions.
Still, the direction is set. The 340 million new smartphone users who came online in 2024 are now financial consumers. Their data is building credit profiles. Their habits are shaping product design. The question is no longer whether unbanked populations will join the financial system. It is which platforms will serve them.
