Predicting growth of 51%, this will be driven by operators expanding their portfolios to include higher-margin advanced services, such as powering merchant payments in-store or via e-commerce, or providing international remittances.

Pivoting to advanced services will allow MFS (mobile financial services) providers to reduce their reliance on revenue from P2P transactions.

This will enable growth in operator revenue streams as offerings expand, but will require mobile money providers to build new capabilities, such as app-based service delivery and credit scoring, to facilitate this shift.

Juniper Research identified major challenges such as the complexity of shifting from basic USSD (unstructured supplementary service data) services to fully app-based experiences as creating hurdles for mobile money providers.

To address this, Juniper Research recognised effective partnerships with digital wallet platform providers to increase their reach across different access channels as critical in revolutionising how services are offered.

"As banks struggle with the distribution of financial services in emerging markets and mobile money services have excellent reach via their agent networks, partnerships between banks and mobile money services are a strong fit. MFS providers must strike partnerships with banks to offer the capabilities needed, and with platform providers to improve their technical infrastructures, to best address the advanced services opportunity,” explains Juniper Research co-author author Mélissa Amouny.