Mobile payment doubles to RM100 bln

KUALA LUMPUR: Financial transactions made via the mobile channel continued to gain traction during the year with both transactions and value doubling as the platform leveraged on the high mobile phone penetration among the Malaysian population.

In 2018, financial transactions conducted via the mobile banking channel had more than doubled to 257.4 million transactions valued at RM100.1 billion (2017: 107.7 million, RM50.7 billion).

This was supported by a continued increase in subscribers to mobile banking services to 6.6 million subscribers in 2018 versus 4.4 million in the previous year, Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM) said in its Financial Stability and Payment Systems Report 2018 released yesterday.

The bank said non-banks are also making headway in this segment.

Of the 47 non-bank e-money issuers in Malaysia, three in four offer mobile payment solutions.

The number of subscriptions to non-bank mobile payment services increased significantly to 10.4 million in 2018 from 0.8 million in 2017.

Non-banks processed a total of 31.1 million mobile payment transactions during the year valued at RM1.3 billion versus 1.0 million transactions of RM240.3 million in value in 2017.

“Although still at a nascent stage, mobile payments are increasingly displacing cash in day-to-day purchase transactions,” it said.

Of significance, total mobile payments made for purchase transactions increased by 20 times to 23.7 million transactions versus a mere 1.2 million in 2017 with an average transaction value of RM23.80.

Non-banks have played a key role in driving this trend, accounting for 88.4 per cent of these transactions.

As at end-2018, more than 65,000 registrations were recorded among merchants for the acceptance of mobile payments, of which more than half were facilitated by nonbank e-money issuers.

Although 18 banks offer mobile banking services to date which account for 89.2 per cent of the total current and savings accounts, only two banks have introduced Quick Response (QR) code payment services so far.

At this stage, the banks’ focus is mostly centred on completing the development efforts to introduce an interoperable QR code payment solution under PayNet’s interoperable QR scheme, which is expected to be rolled out in 2019, it said.

“Going forward, the mobile payments landscape is expected to be more vibrant as competition heightens among banks and nonbanks,” said BNM. – Bernama