Bank of Uganda has revealed that in 2022/2023, the volume of mobile money transactions carried out on this National Payments System amounted to Shs191.1Trn.
The details are contained in the 2022/2023 annual report for Bank of Uganda that was recently released, indicating that by 30th June 2023, mobile money transaction values significantly increased by 22.6% from UGX156Trn in June 2022 to UGX191.3Trn.
The report also revealed that the transaction volumes increased from 4.8Bn to 5.8Bn over the same period and similarly, the number of registered mobile money customers as at June 30th 2023 stood at 42.9 million reflecting a 11.4% increase from 38.5 million in June 2022.
According to the Central Bank, the active customers who transacted at least once in the preceding three months increased by 16.3% from 22.7 million in June 2022 to 26.4 million in June 2023. At the same date, the 26.4 million active e-money accounts were held by a total of 20.7 million NIN holders, representing approximately 46.8% of the total population in Uganda.
Statistics from Bank of Uganda also further highlighted that mobile money customers continue to show a stronger preference for low value transactions with an average transaction value of Shs36,477 posted during the year. In addition, low value transactions remain dominant with 92.8% of the transaction volume constituted by transactions less or equal to Shs50,000.
The Central Bank’s report also revealed that the transaction values on agent banking platforms registered a significant increase of 29% from UGX9.7Trn in June 2022 to UGX12.5Trn in June 2023, with Bank of Uganda noting that the shared agent banking platform continues to be a key enabler for the moblization of deposits especially in the rural areas.
The report further revealed that transactions volume on the shared agent banking platform marginally increased by 2.3% from 8.6 million transactions in the year ended June 2022 to 8.8 million transactions in the twelve months to June 2023.
However, the growth in both mobile money and agent banking transactions also came with an increase in a number of complaints from customers with the report indicating that a total of 433,258 complaints were received and handled by Supervised Financial Institutions between July 2022 and June 2023 a significant decline from 917,938 raised during FY2021/2022.
Bank of Uganda revealed that the biggest of the complaints was in the Mobile Money/ mobile banking category followed by loan processing, agent banking and debit cards.
