A Billion Mobile Bankers?

by Snarketing 2.0

By Ron Shevlin

Someone recently forecast that, by 2017, there will be one billion mobile banking consumers across the globe.

Having forecast mobile banking consumers myself (just US, not globally), I’m interested in these projections as a sanity check against my own numbers.

Here’s my quick and dirty analysis to see if the 1 billion number is reasonable.

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The Population Reference Bureau projects that world population will reach ~7.5 billion people by 2017, ~80% of whom will be in lesser-developed countries. The PRB also estimates that, worldwide, roughly 30% of the population is under the age of 15.

These points are relevant because: 1) the unbanked rate is much higher in lesser developed countries than developed countries (~75% vs. 10-15%), and 2) I’m assuming that people under the age of 15 don’t have checking (or prepaid) accounts.

These assumptions/projections leaves us with .95 billion banked adults in the developed countries, and 1.05 billion banked adults in the lesser-developed countries, for a total of 2 billion banked adults, worldwide. For mobile bankers to hit 1 billion, the adoption rate for mobile banking would have to be 50%.

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