Orange Money reaches 10 million subscribers. A strong Ivory Coast but not so strong elsewhere

Orange, the french owned global telecoms company announced today that Orange Money in in African and Middle East operations has hit 10 million subscribers. The company also said today that  their mobile money service is processing a total 2.2 billion (US$3 billion today) in transactions a year in all their country operations combined.

Orange Money is in 12 African (Botswana, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Egypt, Guinea, Kenya, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritius, Niger, Senegal and Uganda) and one country in Western Asia (Jordan).

Orange attributes the healthy numbers to the story of financial exclusion and the revolution of Mobile Money in underdeveloped and developing markets. The service allows customers to transfer money to other mobile users, to transfer money to and from a regular bank account, bill payments, receive salaries, airtime top-ups, and do international money transfers. They were the first mobile money provider to provider cross border transfers when they launched the service between Mali, Senegal and Cote d’Ivoire last year.

In 2012, Orange said they had 5.5 million mobile money customers, and then 7 million in last year, so this shows quite an accelerated growth in the service. The Orange story is not successful across their operations, having come late to some markets – like Kenya where they where forced to go for a bank led model – and also playing in some markets that have healthy bancarization like Morocco Tunisia and Jordan. A key success market however has been Ivory Coast where 40% of the mobile network’s customers are registered to the mobile money service.