The mobile industry continues to drive growth, overtaking a number of institutions in conducting business. According to the Chief Executive Officer Cellulant Mobile Ken Njoroge, there is a lot of growth in mobile banking in Kenya, something which is being driven by the mass market, with people  transacting most of their services through their cell phones. He said more consumers were consuming services that are being offered by the mobile companies because it is easy to access and saves time and energy.
“Mobile banking has accelerated payments because it’s at the finger tip, u click and pay the bills and this has increased convergence within the consumer”, said Njoroge. He said that the growth of Internet services has also acted as a stepping stone for the mobile industry because now people with richer phones which can access the General Service Pocket Radio (GPRS) could check what they want to purchase online and this has led to a mass demand of smart phones in the market. He said Kenya and Nigeria had a large market base where people were embracing technology and this had improved the two countries’ economies, hence the reason they decided to launch here.
“At the moment the mobile money encompassing mobile banking, mobile payments and mobile money transfer is an emerging opportunity with  huge growth prospects estimated to reach US$5 billion by 2012”, said Njoroge.
He said in Europe, the largest mobile added service by revenue contribution were mobile phone ringtones, sports scores delivered by SMS and  mobile games while in Latin America mobile music accounted for 38.1 per cent of the Brazilian mobile content service market revenues, generating US$250.2 million.
“In Africa, 1 out of 5 people have bank accounts yet it’s a continent that according to estimation will be having 600 million consumers by 2013 and with an additional 35,000 new banking customers a day. What makes us as a company not to hit the US$1 billion target in Africa in the next five years?” asked Njoroge. He said more than 100 countries in the world were looking at Kenya to learn about the future of a cashless economy.