Global Statshot: Online financial services

Connected devices can play in delivering financial empowerment, while simultaneously challenging stereotypes of who’s using online banking today. More than half (52.1 percent) of South Africa’s working-age internet users say that they have interacted with a banking, investment, or insurance website or app in the past 30 days, which is significantly higher than the equivalent figures for the United States (38.4 percent) and the United Kingdom (41.1 percent).

For context, internet penetration in South Africa currently sits at 70 percent, compared with 92 percent in the USA, and 98 percent in the UK.

But South Africa isn’t the only “developing” economy where the level of adoption of online financial services is higher than it is in the world’s largest economy.

At 45.5 percent of working-age internet users, Brazil also sees relatively high rates of online banking adoption, as does Malaysia (44.1 percent).

Various factors may contribute to these differences, but one of the clear takeaways from this data is that – provided the necessary infrastructure is in place and relevant services are available – a country’s economic standing isn’t the only determinant of whether its citizens will embrace online financial services. 

However, perhaps surprisingly, older internet users are considerably more likely to use online banking, investment, and insurance services than younger users are.

Once again, there may be various reasons for these differences, but these findings provide valuable reference and context for policymakers hoping to address issues relating to financial empowerment.

Turning to more innovative financial products, it’s interesting to note that people in developing economies are considerably more likely to have embraced crypto currencies than their peers in more economically developed countries are.

Overall, GWI reports that 1 in 9 working-age internet users around the world now owns some form of “crypto”, but this figure jumps to almost 1 in 4 in Turkey.

The rapid decline in the value of Turkey’s fiat currency over recent months likely played an important role in this trend, and may help to explain why ownership of crypto in Turkey has jumped by roughly 28 percent in just the past 3 months.

However, cryptocurrencies are also increasingly popular across South-East Asia, with more than 1 in 5 working age internet users in the Philippines (22.7 percent) and Thailand (20.3 percent) saying that they now own some form of crypto.

Ownership of digital currencies is significantly skewed towards male internet users though, with GWI’s data indicating that – at a global level – men are almost 60 percent more likely to own crypto than women are.

Reference:

Digital 2022 Global Overview Report, Global Statshot, DataReportal/We Are Social/Hootsuite, Simon Kemp, 21 April 2022