Yes, COVID is the Big Bang of Digital Payments

The growth in mobile money last year was remarkable: 136 million accounts were added in 2020 alone, a 13 percent growth rate, and of the 1.2 billion accounts total, over 300 million are monthly active users, up 17 percent. To put this in perspective, it took the industry a decade to reach 100 million active users; in under 5 years, this figure tripled. Transactions were valued at $767 billion last year — up 22 percent — with over $2 billion being processed every day. December 2020 alone saw more than $70 billion in transactions. (Compare these figures to the IMF’s provisional estimates of 2020 GDP growth, showing a drop of 4.4 percent worldwide and a drop of 3.3 percent in emerging economies.)
What’s particularly important to note is that mobile money transactions have firmly moved well beyond their origins in peer-to-peer (P2P) transfers and bill payments. Services such as salary disbursements, social transfer payments, savings, credit, insurance, and international remittances are now widely available across the mobile money ecosystem. (In 2020, over $1 billion per month in international remittances was processed, an increase of 65 percent from the previous year.)

​Read More Here