Mobile money transfers are expected to rise nearly 150% this year to more than 13 billion transactions on the back of soaring payments over social media led by companies like Chinese online platforms WeChat and Alipay.

 

A report by Juniper Research shows both WeChat and Alipay saw astonishing spikes in P2P (Person to Person) traffic during February 2015. This was the result of result of ‘red envelope’ P2P gifting activity when WeChat users engaged in more than 3.3 billion P2P transactions in just 6 days over the Chinese New Year period. WeChat is the messaging and payment app of technology firm Tencent, while Alipay is the online payment platform of e-commerce firm Alibaba.

 

In the US, social payment service Venmo is now experiencing traffic worth nearly $1 billion per quarter and  leading social media companies are now introducing their own services. Snapchat has partnered with Square to deliver a P2P offering, while Facebook launched a US-wide service last month.

In developing markets, the research found that while airtime top up accounted for the largest share of transactions, there had been a significant increase in the deployment and adoption of services such as micro-lending, savings and micro-insurance.

 

It argued that network operators were well positioned to deliver key data for risk assessment in the form of customer top-up histories, social media usage and location data, which could be subjected to analytics to provide information for credit scoring.

 

The report also adds that there are now 17 markets, the majority in sub-Saharan Africa, where the number of mobile wallets exceeds the number of banked individuals. Service providers are expected to generate US$2 billion from mobile money services this year, rising to $4 billion by 2018.