Mobile money will not grow much further until people use it to pay their utility bills.
That is where digital development’s clearest success story is stuck. Across Africa, people use mobile money every day to send money to family. When the electricity or water bill comes due, many of them still pay in cash.
The industry thinks it knows the fix.
- GSMA Director General Vivek Badrinath names “strengthening consumer protection and fraud controls” as a priority in the State of the Industry Report on Mobile Money 2026.
- The GSMA’s launch announcement adds a call for digital financial literacy programs.
- The Alliance for Financial Inclusion argues that better redress builds consumer confidence.
- We made a version of that case on ICTworks when we argued for accessible grievance redress in digital financial services.
All are wrong. Consumer protection and literacy will not move bill payments. Two things will. People need proof that the payment reached their utility account, and they need to pay less to send it.
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Utility Bills Are Where Mobile Money Stalls
The GSMA’s 2026 report shows merchant payments jumped 42% to $155 billion in 2025. Bill payments grew 8% to almost $99 billion. In Sub-Saharan Africa, home to over two-thirds of mobile money bill payments, bill value grew just 6%.
Samora Kariuki of Frontier Fintech went through five years of GSMA data. He found bills shrank from 5% of monthly mobile money value in 2020 to 4% in 2025. The World Bank’s Global Findex 2025 found that only 40% of adults in low- and middle-income economies who paid a utility bill paid it digitally.
Six in ten people who paid a utility bill did not use a digital payment.
This matters for growth. Kariuki argues that mobile money mostly moves value between two cash endpoints. A utility bill is one of the few payments where mobile money replaces the cash outright, and every household gets one every month.
Consumer Protection is Not the Gap
A new study from KAIST surveyed 270 mobile money users in 14 African countries. It asked why they skip mobile money for big payments.
Users who trusted refund procedures and customer support felt a little less afraid of losing money. That trust did nothing for their uncertainty about whether the payment went through. Of everything the researchers measured, trust in safeguards had the weakest link to avoiding mobile money.
The authors call this the insurance paradox. A customer can believe the telco will refund a failed payment and still not know whether the electricity company recorded it. It is one small online survey. The direction still matches what the GSMA’s own bill numbers show.
Digital Literacy Is Not the Gap
The KAIST respondents are among the most digitally capable users in Africa. Over nine in ten hold a university degree, and most use mobile money every week.
They still avoid mobile money for big bills.
The biggest driver in the study was a chain. One survey question asked users whether the system forces them through too many steps just to get proof of a bill payment. They agreed that too many steps to finish a payment led to not knowing whether it worked, and that uncertainty led to paying in cash.
Literacy training cannot teach a university graduate to trust a confirmation the utility never sends.
Confidence Has to Come From the Biller
Pay cash at the utility office and you leave with a stamped receipt from the company that took your money. Pay by mobile money and you get an SMS from the telco. Whether the utility credited your account is a separate question, and the customer often cannot answer it.
One bad experience makes this worse. Some KAIST respondents had lived through a failed or wrong transaction. For them, uncertainty pushed them toward cash about three times as hard as it pushed everyone else.
Tanzania’s Ministry of Finance built one answer.
Since a 2017 amendment to the Public Finance Act, all public money flows through the Government electronic Payment Gateway. The agency issues a control number tied to a specific bill. The payer pays it by mobile money or bank, and the payment lands against the agency’s own record. The payee confirms the payment.
I have not found published data on whether GePG moved payments off cash. The design still points at the right institution. Utilities and revenue authorities hold the ledger, so they have to issue the proof.
Price Has to Fall Too
Kariuki’s analysis makes the cost case. Brazil’s free Pix system sees 94% of accounts used monthly and India’s UPI about 70%, against 26% for mobile money. The GSMA itself reports that government transaction taxes push users back to cash. Operators set fees and finance ministries set taxes, so both own this half of the problem.
Price alone will not do it. Kariuki notes that M-Pesa charges fees and still sees near-universal monthly use in Kenya. A cheap payment the utility does not recognize is still a gamble with the household’s electricity.
Fix the receipt and the price together, and the bill moves. Until then, the electricity bill stays a cash transaction and mobile money will underperform its promise.
