United Bank Limited (UBL) Omni has been identified as a sprinter in a global survey by the GSMA’s Mobile Money for the Unbanked (MMU) programme.
The survey, titled Global Mobile Money Adoption Survey, analysed the state of the mobile money industry in 2012 and illustrated key findings from the programme’s Mobile Money Deployment Tracker, a database that monitored the number of live and planned mobile money services for the unbanked across the globe. The annual survey was developed to quantify the state of the mobile money industry and to enable mobile money providers to benchmark their performance.
The findings of the survey which was carried out in June last year were released at the GSMA Global Mobile World Congress held in Barcelona last month. UBL Omni had been identified as a “sprinter” because of its rapid growth, along with 13 other mobile money or branchless banking deployments around the world.
As of today, globally there are about 150 deployments with a total “registered” agent base of just over half a million. UBL Omni’s agent base gave it a 2.4% share of the global agent market and was the only bank to feature in the survey. The bank also had a 1.4% share of the global transaction count contributing towards making UBL Omni a sizable player in the Mobile Money market.
“International prominence for our branchless banking model is a matter of great pride for us,” said UBL President and CEO Atif Bokhari. “We are the only commercial bank in Pakistan that has taken the lead in setting up a new business model to a scale that makes Omni a meaningful benchmark for the global branchless banking industry. This survey is another proof of that fact,” he added.
UBL Omni was one of the pioneering players of Pakistan’s Branchless Banking sector that offered G2P disbursements, corporate cash collections, salary disbursements, mobile accounts, money transfers and bill payment services. Omni also catered to financial needs of the underprivileged by facilitating the government and other international donor agencies in providing loan repayment and cash grant facility aimed at the deserving.