“South African consumers are driving a mobile transacting revolution enabled by a slew of innovative home grown technology companies. Local retailers, brands and agencies are leveraging the power of mobile transactions in clever ways to unlock new revenue streams and boost customer retention.”

So says Bevan Ducasse, CEO of wiGroup, following the release of the company’s white paper on in-store mobile transacting.

According to the 2013 GSM African Mobile Observatory report, South Africa has just under 60 million mobile phones in use today. “In a population of only 50 million people, it’s reasonably safe to assume that the overwhelming majority of South Africans own a mobile phone. With the explosion of mobile transaction services and apps, and the increasing affordability of smartphones, the challenge today is how retailers can tap into the vast potential for additional revenue, customer retention and innovative marketing campaigns offered by mobile transactions” says Ducasse.

 

Global market adoption looking healthy

Ducasse says recent success in mobile payment adoption in other markets has been encouraging. “US coffee chain Starbucks developed a mobile payment app that processed $1-billion in transactions in 2013 alone. In China, the value of all mobile payments in 2013 came to $1.6-trillion, a more than 200% increase on the year before. While Africa has traditionally led the adoption of mobile payments and mobile money transfer, clearly the more developed markets are catching on.”

One of the key challenges of driving adoption of in-store mobile transacting has been a lack of uniformity.