Fortumo Launches New Quarterly Emerging Markets Mobile Payments Index

Mobile payments company Fortumo has created a new quarterly Emerging Markets Payment Index intended to be used by web, game and app developers for benchmarking their revenue in markets with high smartphone growth and low credit card penetration. 

The Emerging Markets Payment Index focuses on top smartphone markets that have been predicted for growth by value in 2015 including India, Indonesia, South Africa, Brazil, Pakistan, Nigeria, Egypt and Vietnam. Fortumo data shows these markets have a significantly lower level of access to traditional online payments than mature economies. India and Vietnam for example have a credit card penetration below 2% and in Nigeria 99.3% of all card transactions are conducted on ATMs. 

Fortumo’s analysis indicates that the biggest growth in transaction volume from carrier billing in emerging markets is coming from India, Nigeria and Vietnam. Meanwhile, Brazil, South Africa and Indonesia have the highest spending on digital content per user. 

Fortumo notes that the average transaction size is below $1 in most of these markets which makes credit card based billing unfeasible for virtual & digital goods as fixed transaction fees eat up a majority of the revenue. Most of the markets analyzed have a double-digit quarterly growth rate in transaction volumes which shows the rapid growth of alternative payment methods among unbanked users.

The payment index aggregates data from various platforms (web, mobile web, feature phones, smartphones) and app stores. Going forward, Fortumo will start providing quarterly updates to its payment index. The index contains data on more than 300 million transactions processed by 122,000 developers using Fortumo to collect payments in 88 countries.

Fortumo’s platform allows developers to set up payment processing for web and mobile services, games or apps. Users with a mobile phone are then able to make one-click payments using Fortumo without the need for a credit card - payments are charged to their mobile operator bill instead. 

Fortumo payments are cross-platform and work in PC applications, web services and HTML5, Android, Windows Phone and Windows 8 apps. Fortumo supports payments in 88 countries through 350 mobile operators, including a number of exclusive direct carrier billing partnerships.