The report formed by research group World Wide Worx found that only 27% of users in rural areas used mobile banking. The analyst suggests this demonstrates how rural users are a year behind their urban neighbours in the take up of services. Overall, 37% of South African adults in both rural and urban areas used mobile banking. The increasing use of mobile banking services was attributed to the increased conversion to the ‘anywhere, anytime’ concept of banking. In a country where only 68% of the population has bank accounts, there are limitations as to how much of the population these services can reach.
The most popular mobile services were the most basic with 78% using it for balance enquiries and 58% using it for notifications. In 2010, more people began to use the more major components of mobile banking with 24% using it to pay accounts and 17%
using it to transfer money between accounts.
