With mobile financial services business booming in Uganda’s telecommunication sector, we are yet to see a new entrant into the business. One of Uganda’s youngest carriers –Smart Telecom is going to launch its mobile money platform called Smart Pesa. Just like any other service, it will enable its clients send and receive money from their mobile phones or Smart Telecom agents. This move clearly shows that the telecoms want reach out to the un-banked through financial inclusion to all way becoming the biggest financial services providers. A reliable source has informed this blog that Smart Telecom will roll-out their mobile payment platform in the coming weeks.
Smart Telecom’s Smart Pesa joins MTN’s Mobile Money, Airtel’s Airtel Money, UTL’s M-Pesa and Africell’s Africell Money whose comparisons we’ve done before and you can check out here. MTN Uganda which has more than 71. 45% of Uganda’s market share with competition at play, has an average of over 1.8 trillion mobile money transactions with over 70% of all remote payments go through MTN mobile money. According to the latest GSMA report, for 2015, the number of global mobile money services increased to 271 in 93 countries (up from 262 services by the end of 2014). Mobile money transactions topped up to 33 million per day and this high transaction was attributed to a 31% increase in registered users bringing the number to 411 million users worldwide. How Smart Telecom plans to come into this market that is heavily dominated by MTN is yet to be seen.
