After four continuous quarters, a declining trend in Branchless Banking (BB) accounts has been reversed as all indicators witnessed a significant growth during the quarter April-June 2015. According to State Bank of Pakistan (SBP), this growth trend demonstrates the fact that people have started considering branchless banking as a key tool for satisfying their basic financial needs.
The active-to-total account ratio climbed to 34 per cent from 20 per cent in the previous quarter which may be attributed to the release of two BISP tranches, rise in fund transfers between M-wallets and mobile top-ups through M-wallets. In addition, the SBP in its Branchless Banking Publication revealed that the BB accounts exhibited a sharp rise, increasing from 7.5 million accounts in the previous quarter (January-March 2015) to 10.8 million in the April-June 2015. This increase resulted from a massive opening of level-0 accounts, normally opened at agent locations, which now constitute 87 per cent of the total BB accounts. The number of biometric devices at agent locations rose to 47,902, which assisted realtime opening of 1.3 million customer accounts during the quarter.
The SBP said that this encouraging trend in account opening depicts that the footprint of inclusive financial services is getting stronger in bringing the previously excluded socio-economic segments into the financial realm through an easy account opening process.
The number of branchless banking transactions exhibited a phenomenal growth; both in volume and value, reaching to 99.5 million (in volume) and Rs 505.9 billion (in value), showing an increase of 37 per cent and 43 per cent respectively in April-June 2015 over the previous quarter. The customer oriented transactions in overall BB transactions remained 94 per cent in volume and 61 per cent in value; the rest being agent transactions for liquidity purposes. M-wallet transactions showed encouraging signals by gaining a share of 30 percent (in volume) and 29 percent (in value) in the customer oriented transactions, as compared to 12 percent and 17 percent in the previous quarter respectively.
The average number of transactions per day scaled to 1.1 million, whereas the average size of transaction was Rs 5,083. The total BB deposits increased to Rs 8,553 million from Rs 6,890 million in the previous quarter; however the average deposit in BB accounts fell from Rs 914 in the previous quarter to Rs 786 in the quarter under review. The BB channel facilitated Government to Person (G2P) payments of Rs 36 billion made to 4.2 million beneficiaries as compared to Rs 4.5 billion payments to 3.2 million beneficiaries in the previous quarter. This rise in G2P was mainly due to the release of previous quarter's BISP tranche during the quarter under review.
The number of agents rose to 251,865 from 229,645, showing 10 percent growth over the previous quarter. However, the active agents declined to 77 percent of total agents as compared to 80 per cent in the previous quarter. The SBP has asked the BB players to take steps to reinvigorate the inactive agents through agent development techniques such as guidance, trainings and due facilitation.
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