Mobile Money Transfers Breed of Mobile Payments to Clear 200 Billion Transactions by 2024

Between mobile wallets from banks, those connected to credit cards, and those connected to individual businesses, the sheer number of ways to both send and receive payments could leave anybody’s head spinning. One segment of the mobile payments market poised for substantial growth is the mobile money transfers market, a field that a new report from Juniper Research says is set to grow substantially in the near term.

The Juniper Research report, “Digital Money Transfer & Remittances: Domestic and International Markets 2019-2024”, projects big growth ahead on the digital money transfer front. It suggests that the volume of money transferred over mobile devices will clear the 200 billion transaction mark in 2024, which is pretty impressive given that the total market in 2019 is just 130 billion transactions.

Indeed, social payments are set to drive a lot of the gains forward; Venmo led the way on this front, but it’s also set to see further gains elsewhere. Assuming the Libra cryptocurrency can ever get off the ground, its own connection to social media will help give it a boost too.

Right now, the biggest gains in the mobile money transfer market are in China, thanks in large part due to the “lucky money” concept that accompanies the new year celebrations therein. The practice of giving cash in red envelopes was tailor-made for mobile money transfer systems, and as such, Chinese transactions are poised to account for 68 percent of the domestic mobile transfer market in 2019.

As noted by Juniper’s Nick Maynard “Social payments are highly appealing to younger users, as they enable simple and effective digital payments to displace cash. However, data security concerns about mixing payments and social networks will impact consumer attitudes among older users.”

That last isn’t much of a surprise; older users have commonly had more problem with all mobile payments technologies than their younger equivalent. With younger users rapidly coming into prominence among disposable income brackets, though, their growth will likely be sufficient to fuel growth across the entire market for some time to come.

Regardless of who’s doing the driving, though, it’s clear that mobile payments are gaining at least some ground. Mobile money transfer, meanwhile, may prove to be one of the biggest leaders on this front.