Boku Inc.: Southeast Asia is the fastest growing region for mobile wallets worldwide

Southeast Asia is the fastest-growing region for mobile wallets globally, followed by Latin America and Africa and the Middle East, according to research by London-based fintech company Boku Inc. The number of mobile wallets used in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam will grow 311% to nearly 440 million by 2025 from 2020, reflecting the boom in e-commerce, according to the global industry research report released Thursday in partnership with Juniper Research Ltd.

During the same period, usage in Latin America will expand 166%, while usage in Africa and the Middle East will grow 147%.

According to the report, mobile wallets surpassed credit cards in 2019 to become the most widely used payment type in the world, and the adoption of this contactless payment method has accelerated during the pandemic. At the end of 2020, there were more than 2.8 billion mobile wallets in use, and this number is expected to increase by 74% to 4.8 billion by the end of 2025.

The study found that there are two different types of mobile wallets in the world. One is card-based mobile wallets, such as Apple Pay and Google Pay, which are more popular in developed regional markets. The other is stored-value mobile wallets, such as China's Alipay and Grab Holding Inc.'s GrabPay, which are popular in emerging markets where credit card usage is low.

In 2020, 55 stored-value mobile wallets processed more than $1 billion in transactions per year. Pakistan’s SadaPay is expected to be the world’s fastest-growing mobile wallet by 2025, followed by Brazil’s Mercado Pago and PicPay.

China’s electronic payment wallets may have limited impact outside their home markets, the research report said, even though Ant Financial Group’s Alipay has taken stakes in international companies including mobile payment platform bKash Ltd., and Tencent Holdings Ltd.’s WeChat Pay was approved for use in Indonesia in 2020. “They seem unlikely to conquer emerging Asia as many once thought,” the report said, adding that their use overseas is also largely limited to Chinese tourists.

From cnbeta