Mobile Money API Industry Report: The Challenges of Seamless Integration

The mobile money industry continues to grow at a fast pace, accelerated by its evolution towards a platform-based approach through partner integrations. Historically, the mobile money industry focused mainly on person-to-person (P2P) transfers and cash-in / cash-out transactions. However, as the ecosystem has grown there has been a clear shift towards other use cases, creating new revenue streams while also deepening existing ones. Mobile money use cases are on the rise as more industry verticals plug into the ecosystem, enabling access of various services to underserved communities.

APIs (Application Programme Interfaces) are the technology that underpins and drives this ecosystem growth, with open APIs enabling various verticals to integrate with mobile money providers (MMPs) directly. Although many MMPs are increasingly offering open APIs, direct integration with third parties is not yet the norm.

This research by the GSMA explores the challenges and opportunities presented by partner integrations via Open APIs.