Myanmar’s Wave Money Clocks More Than a Million Monthly Users for Its Wavepay App
by Fintech News Singapore November 2, 2020Wave Money, a Myanmar-based mobile financial services provider, announced that its WavePay application has crossed 1.1 million monthly active users in October.
With a remittance value reportedly reaching 8 Trillion Myanmar Kyat (US$ 5.9 billion) from January to September 2020, Wave Money posted a daily average growth of 162% in new WavePay registrations by comparison to January 2020.
The figures were reported in accordance with the internationally-recognised metrics of the GSM Association (GSMA), reflecting the strong market opportunity and rapid adoption of mobile money in Myanmar.
Brad Jones
“This is a very exciting milestone because it’s a positive indicator not only of our performance but the health of the industry as a whole and how people are embracing digital. In line with our vision of creating a fairer future for Myanmar, we couldn’t be happier knowing that mobile money is now a big part of their daily lives,”
said Brad Jones, CEO of Wave Money.
An active mobile money account is a mobile money account which has been used to conduct at least one transaction during a certain period of time of either 30 days or 90 days, according to GSMA, the world’s largest industry organisation of mobile network operators.
In its 2019 State of the Industry Report (SOTIR), GSMA noted that customers used their mobile money accounts more often and as part of their daily activities. At the end of last year, 35.8% of some 372 million accounts were active on a 90-day basis.
The gap between activity on a 30-day and 90-day basis is narrowing, the report said, with 70% of 90-day active accounts now active on a monthly basis. GSMA predicts that by 2025, the number of monthly mobile money customer accounts would surpass 370 million, the level where 90-day accounts were at last year.
Wave Money is said to have paid more than 62 billion Myanmar Kyat (US$46 million) in commissions to agents during the January to September 2020 period alone.
Disbursements from the government and NGO sectors represented a substantial share of the total remittance value in 2020, driven largely by COVID-19 relief funds.
As of the end of September, Wave Money said it transferred more than 17 billion Myanmar Kyat (US$13 million) as payment partner of governments and NGOs.
Wave Money waived all service fees for the disbursement of funds to those hard-hit by the pandemic for the duration of the crisis.
Since March, hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people have been digitally receiving emergency funds using WavePay.
