The global evidence, in sixteen swipes. Every figure is verified against a named primary source — tap any reel's data button to see the numbers behind it.
Prepared for Vodafone Business · Supersweet programme
swipe up ↑
02
Vodafone Ireland's own research · 2026
The top three things we do on our phones:
1Family & friends66%
2Social media54%
3Banking & managing money32%
Not Float's research — Vodafone Ireland's own, announced by CEO Sabrina Casalta: "what hasn't changed is the importance of human connection."
Now read №1 and №3 together. What family and friends share most is money — pocket money, the split bill, the dig-out home. A wallet on every Vodafone number puts banking inside the №1 thing people do on their phones. Connection is the pull.
03
The scale
$0 trillion+
moved through mobile-money wallets in 2025 — networks run by phone companies, not banks.
2.3bn registered accounts worldwide — one for every 3.5 people alive
20 years to reach the first $1 trillion. 4 years to double it.
04
The origin
The company that invented this industry?
Vodafone.
M-Pesa launched in March 2007, built by Safaricom and Vodafone. It became the most successful mobile-money platform on earth — and it is still in the family.
05
M-Pesa today
0%
of Safaricom's Kenyan service revenue is now M-Pesa. Not calls. Not data. Payments.
KES 41.7trn (~US$322bn) processed in FY2026 — 46.4bn transactions
41m monthly active customers in Kenya alone
60.6% of Safaricom's valuation is the financial services arm — Standard Investment Bank
06
Closer to home than it looks
$0 bn
processed by Vodafone-family mobile-money platforms in the year to March 2026 — Vodacom, including Safaricom.
103m financial-services customers across the family
R16.8bn Vodacom financial-services revenue, up 19.6% in one year
Vodafone doesn't need convincing that telcos can run payments. Vodafone already runs one of the largest payments businesses on earth.
07
The margins
0%
EBITDA margin on Airtel Africa's mobile-money arm. MTN's fintech platform runs at 42.8%. Payments is the highest-margin product a telco can sell.
$994m Airtel Money revenue, growing 29.9% — now 20.1% of group revenue
$500.3bn processed by MTN MoMo across 69.5m monthly active users
Airtel is preparing to IPO the money business on its own
08
When the wallet outgrows the telco
0×
GCash — built by Globe Telecom in the Philippines — is heading to IPO at roughly twice Globe's entire market value.
~$11bn IPO valuation vs Globe's ~$4.6bn market cap
40.4m monthly active users — 55% of all Filipino adults
22% of Globe's pre-tax income now comes from its 34% GCash stake
09
Not an Africa story. A telco story.
From Riyadh to Tokyo, telcos run money.
🇸🇦 stc · Saudi12m+wallet customers converted into stc bank — the Kingdom's first licensed digital bank (2025)
🇹🇷 Turkcell+41.7%Paycell revenue growth; 78% of its revenue now comes from beyond Turkcell's own base
🇵🇰 Telenor legacy59mEasypaisa users; Pakistan's first digital retail bank licence, Jan 2025
🇵🇰 VEON~9%of Pakistan's GDP flows through JazzCash — 60m users, ~$60bn a year
🇯🇵 KDDI¥4.5trndeposits at au Jibun Bank, the telco's banking arm — up 53% in a year
🇦🇪 e&2m+e& money customers; central-bank licence to enter lending, Feb 2026
10
Meanwhile, in Vodafone's markets…
0 million
Irish people hold a Revolut account — roughly three in four adults, on the company's own framing. The pole position telcos took everywhere else was taken here by well-funded neobanks riding the telcos' own rails.
Revolut: 75m+ customers, £1.7bn profit (2025), valued at $75bn
The rest of the pack: Nubank 135m, bunq 20m, Wise 18.9m, Monzo 15.2m, N26, Starling, Trade Republic, Chime — nearly all now profitable
And the attack is turning: Revolut now sells mobile plans in the UK — running on Vodafone's network
11
The honest reel
–€1.03 bn
is what Orange lost trying to be a bank. The same company's payments business is thriving. Same telco — opposite outcomes.
Orange Bank · France–€1.025bn
Full retail bank, launched 2017. Cumulative operating losses of €1.025bn against just €449m of total banking income. Wound down from 2023.
Orange Money · Africa€164bn
Payments on mobile rails. ~40m active customers, 9bn transactions worth €164bn in 2024, revenue up 20.4%. Profitable and growing.
12
The pattern
Telcos fail when they build banks. They win when they distribute payments.
Every winner on the previous reels runs the same structure: the telco brings distribution, billing and trust. The regulated partner carries everything else.
Supersweet carries the licence, the liability and the compliance burden. The regulatory heavy lifting never touches Vodafone.
The relationships — Visa, Mastercard, banking, open banking, acquirers — are Supersweet's to build and manage. So is the capability: accept payments in any form, connected to the top 80 accounting packages globally
The winners never carry the bank: Globe holds 34% of GCash; M-Pesa sits in a JV; Easypaisa is co-sponsored by Ant
Vodafone stays a telco. One product, one bill — fintech economics with none of the regulatory exposure.
13
The smarter play
We don't fight the neobanks. We connect them.
Open banking makes every account in Ireland — AIB, BOI, PTSB, Revolut, N26, bunq — a one-tap, biometric funding source for the Vodafone wallet. The neobanks spent a decade building on the telcos' rails. Open banking lets Vodafone build on theirs.
Fully live across the EEA and the UK — the world's most mature open-banking market: 16m users, volumes +53% in 2025, commercial VRPs from Q1 2026. Nothing restricts us in the UK.
Revolut is ubiquitous but shallow: fewer than 5% of its Irish customers have their salary paid in — the money sits where open banking reaches
Day-one rail built with Tink (Visa-owned) — plus two rails no neobank can copy: top-up on the Vodafone bill and your number as your payment address
14
Why Ireland, why now
Ireland is the open goal.
Ireland has no domestic payments scheme — Synch, the banks' joint answer to Revolut, died in November 2023 before it ever launched
The EU forced Apple's NFC chip open across the EEA in July 2024 — wallets and phone-as-terminal no longer need Apple's permission
Vodafone's SME base + Supersweet: SoftPOS from day one, a wallet with a real IBAN, co-branded card issuing — each rung of the ladder adds billed monthly revenue and switching cost
Every market on the reels before this one had a telco that moved first. Ireland's hasn't moved yet.
15
The product · V-Wallet
Not a slide. A product.
Accept payments anywhere, directly to your smartphone or by a payment link. Issue yourself a card. Link every bank. Text money anywhere. Swipe →
Every account, one app. Family, joint, business — and your AIB account, linked by open banking.
Issue yourself a card. A Visa in seconds — spending in Lidl by lunchtime.
Move money any way. Money Link, bank account, card — from any account you hold.
Text money to anyone. €100 by text, WhatsApp or email — anywhere on earth.
…and the full stack. Kids' cards, invoicing, credit against the bill, accounting, loyalty.
16
The ask
Supersweet is the partner.
Payment acceptance is the beachhead
Card issuing is the attraction — for every consumer and every business
Connection to all your personal and business bank accounts is the moat
Connected to the top 80 accounting packages globally, out of the box
Every telco on these reels started with one product and a partner. Ireland is the proving ground — and VodafoneThree, Britain's largest mobile network, makes the UK the prize.
The full data library, with every source, is one swipe away.
data library ↓
Data library · all sources
How these numbers were checked: compiled July 2026 from operator annual reports, results booklets, regulator statements and GSMA industry data. Each headline claim was independently verified against the named source below before inclusion; where a figure is single-source, an operator's own marketing claim, or an analyst estimate, it is labelled as such in that reel's data panel.
Float × Vodafone · Confidential · Straw man for discussion. Commercial figures for the Supersweet ladder are Float's illustrative model, not third-party data.
FLOAT × VODAFONE1 / 13
The data
Vodafone Ireland's 25th-anniversary research
To mark 25 years in Ireland, Vodafone Ireland commissioned a study of 500 mobile phone users aged 40+ (published late June / early July 2026). Announcing it, CEO Sabrina Casalta said:
"For 25 years, we've seen mobile phones transform from simple handsets into something far more powerful — an essential hub for how we live, work and stay connected. What hasn't changed is the importance of human connection."
What people use their phones for
Share
Staying connected with family & friends
66%
Social media
54%
Banking, budgeting & managing finances
32%
Reading the news
31%
Practical tasks (navigation, weather)
23%
Work, email & productivity
21%
The top-three ranking is a finding of Vodafone Ireland's own commissioned research announced alongside the CEO's quote (sample: 500 users aged 40+); ThinkBusiness reports the family/friends figure as 67%. The strategic point stands on Vodafone's own numbers: the #1 use is communication — Vodafone's business — and the #3 use is banking, where Vodafone currently has no product. Float's read (interpretation, not survey data): №1 and №3 are the same behaviour — what family and friends share most is money (pocket money, split bills, allowances, repayments). P2P by phone number puts the wallet inside the №1 relationship, which is how M-Pesa ('Send money home') and Bizum reached ubiquity.
These are screens from the live V-Wallet product design (Float × Supersweet, July 2026) — not mock-ups for this deck. Four capabilities carry the consumer story:
Capability
What the customer gets
Issue yourself a card
Instant virtual Visa issued in-app — physical, virtual and disposable card types, added straight to Apple or Google wallet. Card issuing is the moat: it puts a Vodafone-branded card at the top of the customer's wallet.
Connect every bank
Open banking links the customer's existing accounts — AIB, BOI, Revolut, N26 — beside their vAccounts, with all transactions in one view and one-tap funding between them.
Family money, controlled
A dedicated Family vAccount plus joint accounts: set up kids' accounts, fund and withdraw, and issue a card straight to a child's phone. This is the №1-phone-behaviour (family) fused with the №3 (banking).
Text money to anyone
Money Link: pick an amount, send by text, WhatsApp or email — to anybody, anywhere in the world, no matter where they bank.
The rest of the stack (from the product spec)
Business & personal accounts · accept payments in any form (vPay tap-to-pay on iPhone, payment links, QR, invoices) · connected to the top 80 accounting packages globally · credit against the Vodafone bill (Klarna-style) · card consolidation (roadmap) · invest · factoring · tax filings · loyalty · referral programme.
Product capability statements are Float's own (design and build status, July 2026), not third-party data — the same standard of honesty as the rest of this deck: market numbers are sourced; product claims are ours. Items marked roadmap/TBD in the spec are not committed for launch.
GSMA's State of the Industry Report on Mobile Money is the standard industry aggregate, compiled from operator-reported data. The 2026 edition covers calendar 2025.
Measure
Value
Transaction value, 2025
$2 trillion+
Registered accounts
2.3bn (+268m YoY)
Monthly active accounts
593m (+15%)
Monthly activity rate
25.7% — highest since 2021
GSMA figures are self-reported by operators to the GSMA. Most new registered and active accounts came from Sub-Saharan Africa.
M-Pesa launched in March 2007, built by Safaricom and Vodafone and seeded by a grant Vodafone won from the UK Department for International Development's Financial Deepening Challenge Fund. In 2020, Vodacom and Safaricom jointly acquired the M-Pesa brand, product development and support services from Vodafone through a dedicated joint venture — M-Pesa Africa.
Fact
Detail
Launch
March 2007
Built by
Safaricom + Vodafone
Seed funding
UK DFID challenge fund
Brand today
M-Pesa Africa JV (2020)
Vodafone → Vodacom stake
65.1%
Vodacom → Safaricom stake
34.94% (→55% pending)
Vodacom's move from 34.94% to a controlling 55% of Safaricom is a pending transaction currently before the courts (per Vodacom's FY2026 results booklet).
Safaricom's FY2026 results (reported 7 May 2026). M-Pesa is now Safaricom's largest single revenue line — bigger than voice, bigger than mobile data — and an independent analyst attributes the majority of the company's value to the financial services arm.
+13.4% in one year. M-Pesa = 45.6% of Kenya service revenue (KES 400.8bn).
Measure (FY2026)
Value
Transaction value
KES 41.68trn (~$322bn)
Transactions
46.4bn (+25.1%)
Monthly active customers (Kenya)
40.99m
Ethiopia active customers
5.2m (+119%)
Share of Safaricom valuation (SIB)
60.6%
The 45.6% share is of Kenya service revenue (the group share is slightly lower). The 60.6% valuation share is Standard Investment Bank's sum-of-the-parts estimate (27 May 2025) — one analyst's view, not consensus. Ethiopia actives are 90-day, not directly comparable to Kenya's 30-day metric.
Vodacom's FY2026 results (year ended 31 March 2026), including Safaricom. For context, the two largest African rivals are shown alongside.
Annual mobile-money transaction value processed. Fiscal years differ as labelled.
Vodacom measure (FY2026)
Value
Transaction value (incl. Safaricom)
$525.6bn (+16.6%)
Financial-services customers
103.0m (+17.4%)
Financial-services revenue (consolidated)
R16.8bn (+19.6%)
Incl. Safaricom at 100%
~R41.3bn
Share of group service revenue
12.6% (consolidated)
The 103m "financial services customers" metric is Vodacom's definition and broader than M-Pesa wallets alone (it includes e.g. South African insurance customers). Consolidated revenue excludes Safaricom, which is equity-accounted.
Mobile-money arms report software-grade margins with double-digit growth — inside businesses whose core connectivity revenue grows in single digits.
Measure
Value
Airtel Money revenue FY2025
$994m (+29.9% cc)
Airtel Money EBITDA
$525m (52.8% margin)
Share of Airtel Africa group revenue
20.1%
MTN MoMo monthly active users
69.5m (+10%)
MTN MoMo transaction value
$500.3bn (23.3bn transactions)
MTN fintech margin trend
40.7% → 42.8% in one year
Airtel's 20.1% group-revenue share includes intersegment cross-charges eliminated on consolidation. Airtel Money's H1 FY26 annualised value reached $193bn with an IPO "on course" for H1 2026 per the CEO — single secondary source (TechCabal, Oct 2025). MTN's asterisked growth rates are constant-currency.
GCash (operated by Mynt) filed for the largest IPO in Philippine history on 27 June 2026 — ticker GCASH, targeting an October 2026 listing.
Mynt was valued at ~$2bn in 2021 and $5bn in 2024–25 (Ayala, then MUFG's $400m for 8%). The IPO price implies ~PHP 669bn ≈ $10.9–11bn.
Measure
Value
Monthly active users (Mar 2026)
40.4m — ~55% of PH adults
Mynt net income FY2025
PHP 17.2bn (+56%)
Mynt revenue FY2025
PHP 79.8bn (+27%)
Globe's stake
34% (largest shareholder)
Globe's equity share of earnings
PHP 6.1bn (+64%) ≈ 22% of pre-tax income
IPO raise
up to PHP 92.3bn (~$1.5bn)
User and financial figures are from Mynt's IPO prospectus as reported by multiple outlets. Q4 2025 earnings contribution dipped after the central bank mandated delinking of online gambling platforms. No Globe disclosure quantifies GCash's effect on telco churn or ARPU — that link is strategic inference, not a reported number.
12m+ customers at conversion; full launch Jan 2025
stc pay valuation (2020)
~$1.33bn — first Saudi fintech unicorn (Western Union $200m)
Turkcell techfin, Q3 2025
TRY 3,410m revenue (+20%), 6% of group
Paycell, Q3 2025
revenue +41.7%; POS +169%; TTV TRY 48.1bn (+78%)
Easypaisa (Pakistan)
59m registered / 20m monthly active; first digital retail bank licence (SBP, Jan 2025)
Easypaisa FY2025
PAT Rs 17.04bn (underlying ~Rs 6.2bn)
JazzCash (VEON)
60m users; $59.7bn GTV in 12 months to Mar 2026
au Jibun Bank (KDDI, Japan)
¥4.5trn+ deposits (+53% YoY), 6.19m accounts
NTT Docomo finance
¥516bn finance revenues, FY2024
e& money (UAE)
2m+ customers; CBUAE lending licence, Feb 2026
Viettel Money (Vietnam)
~24m users (2023)
Jio Financial (India)
profitable: PAT Rs 1,613 crore FY2024-25
Labels: the JazzCash ~9%-of-GDP comparison is VEON's own 2024 framing. Turkcell figures are IAS 29 inflation-adjusted (the +78% volume is nominal lira). Easypaisa's headline PAT includes a Rs 10.8bn one-off deferred-tax credit. e&'s "most active users in the UAE" is the operator's own claim. Viettel's figure is 2023 vintage. Jio Financial is brand-adjacent to the telco and much of its income is treasury yield — evidence of ambition, not yet cross-sell at scale.
While telcos in Africa, Asia and the Gulf took the payments crown, in Europe it went to venture-funded neobanks — apps that ride the mobile networks telcos built, and monetise the banking layer on top.
Customer metrics differ by company (registered vs active vs revenue-relevant) — treat as order-of-magnitude, per each company's own reporting.
The "three in four Irish adults" penetration framing is company-derived (3.4m customers vs ~4.0–4.2m adults, CSO); no regulator-published penetration figure exists. bunq's 20m is single-source. Every one of these apps depends on mobile connectivity the telcos provide — the telco carries the traffic; the neobank takes the margin.
Open banking: connect every bank, including the neobanks
Under PSD2, any licensed provider can — with the customer's biometric consent — initiate payments from and read balances in any account in the EEA: incumbent banks and neobanks alike. That turns Ireland's 3.4m Revolut accounts from a threat into reachable funding sources for the Vodafone wallet.
Fact
Why it matters
Live in the EEA and the UK
PSD2 covers every EEA account. The UK regime (CMA-mandated, live since 2018) is the world's most mature: 16m users (OBL, Dec 2025), payment volumes +53% YoY, commercial VRPs first live Q1 2026 under the 31-firm UK Payments Initiative. Nothing restricts Float's open-banking model in the UK.
Ubiquity ≠ primacy
Fewer than 5% of Irish Revolut customers have their salary paid into Revolut (per its Ireland country manager, Jun 2026); typical users move ~€300/month across from an incumbent account. The primary relationship is still up for grabs.
Day-one funding rail
Float's wallet ships with open-banking payment initiation (PIS) as the default top-up flow — one tap, confirmed with the customer's own bank biometrics. Built with Tink, the Visa-owned open-banking infrastructure used by Europe's major fintechs. (Float build status.)
What's next: VRP / PSD3
Variable recurring payments — authorise once, auto top-ups forever within agreed limits. Mature in the UK, arriving in the EU via PSD3.
Two rails no neobank can copy
Carrier billing (add €20 to the wallet, charged to the Vodafone bill — no bank involved) and the phone number as a SEPA payment address. Both depend on owning the telco relationship. (Float commercial model; carrier-billing structure requires legal validation.)
The strategic logic: the neobanks proved you can build a bank on someone else's network. Open banking is the same move in reverse — Vodafone builds a money layer on top of every bank's rails, without holding a banking licence, exactly the payments-led structure that wins on the earlier reels. The salary-primacy figure is a single-source executive quote, consistent across Irish coverage. Note: the EU–Apple NFC commitments cited on the Ireland reel are EEA-only — that is a wallet-NFC point, not an open-banking one; UK open banking itself is unrestricted, and more mature than the EU's.
ResearchFloat — "The Wallet" strategy paper (funding stack: PIS via Tink, VRP, carrier billing, phone-number alias)
Where telcos failed — and why
The failures share one shape: telcos that tried to run full retail banks in mature banking markets, where they had no structural advantage. The successes are payments-led, riding the telco's real assets: distribution, billing and the SIM.
Orange lost €1.47 for every €1 of banking income over the venture's life (Light Reading, from Orange disclosures).
Case
Outcome
Orange Bank (FR/ES, 2017)
~2m customers vs 5m target; exit 2023; customers moved to BNP Paribas
O2 Banking (DE, 2016)
~70k customers; closed 30 Apr 2022
T-Mobile Money (US, 2019)
Survives, but folded into the T-Life app in 2025; no user counts ever disclosed
DT ClickandBuy / O2 UK Wallet
closed 2016 / 2014
Orange Money (Africa, same company)
~40m actives, €164bn moved in 2024, revenue +20.4%
Light Reading's diagnosis of Orange Bank: Orange assumed stores, customer relationships and internet savvy would compensate for a lack of banking expertise — but incumbent banks had all three, plus the licence and the balance sheet. The telco advantage is real in payments and distribution; it is not an advantage in running a regulated balance sheet.
Across every success case, the telco never becomes the bank. It monetises what it already owns — distribution, the bill, brand trust, and SIM-based identity — while a dedicated regulated entity carries the licence and compliance.
Winner
Structure
Safaricom / Vodacom
M-Pesa Africa JV; financial services as a segment, not a bank
Globe (GCash)
34% of Mynt, alongside Ant Group (33%) and Ayala
Telenor (Easypaisa)
separate licensed bank, co-sponsored with Ant Group
stc (stc bank)
separately capitalised digital bank (SAR 2.5bn), SAMA-licensed
Turkcell (Paycell)
dedicated techfin segment; 78% of revenue now from outside Turkcell's base
Supersweet × Vodafone runs the same play: Vodafone provides distribution, billing and the brand; Supersweet provides the regulated payments entity, instant merchant onboarding, the wallet with a real IBAN, and card issuing. Vodafone gets fintech economics without ever touching a banking licence.
Where the risk sits: the regulated activities — safeguarding customer funds, KYC and anti-money-laundering, scheme membership, card issuing — sit inside Supersweet's licensed payments entity, along with the relationships that carry them: Visa, Mastercard, banking and open-banking partners, and acquirers. Vodafone's role is distribution and billing. Supersweet also delivers the commercial capability end to end: merchants accept payments in any form — tap-to-pay, payment link, QR, invoice, card or bank transfer — and the platform connects to the top 80 accounting packages globally.
Risk-allocation statement is Float's commercial position, to be reflected in the partnership agreement. Vodafone retains ordinary commercial and brand exposure, as any distribution partner does — but licensing, regulatory capital and compliance obligations rest with Supersweet's regulated entity.
Sources
Structures per the operator disclosures cited in reels 4–8 (Vodacom, Manila Times/IPO filing, SBP, SPA/Argaam, Turkcell 6-K).
The Irish opening
Three structural facts make Ireland unusually open to a telco-led payments play right now.
Fact
Why it matters
Synch died Nov 2023
The Irish banks' joint instant-payments venture folded before launch — Ireland has no domestic scheme and no bank-owned processor to gatekeep one
Apple NFC opened (EEA, Jul 2024)
Free HCE access, default-wallet rights and SoftPOS for licensed EEA PSPs, committed for 10 years — wallets and phone-as-terminal no longer need Apple's permission (UK excluded)
Merchant acceptance precedent
Twint, Bizum, BLIK and Pix show acceptance is won through gatekeepers or an owned estate — a SoftPOS-equipped SME base is an owned acceptance network needing nobody's permission
The Supersweet ladder (Float commercial model — illustrative): SoftPOS from ~€2/month, payment links, smart booking, business-in-a-box at €39–49/month — each rung billed by Vodafone with a revenue share, each rung deepening switching cost. The wallet then extends the same infrastructure to every Vodafone customer: real IBAN, instant P2P by phone number, carrier-billing top-ups no fintech can copy, and a co-branded card.
Ladder pricing is Float's straw-man commercial model, not third-party data. Ireland-context findings are from Float's July 2026 merchant-acceptance research (primary sources on file: European Commission Apple commitments decision, Bizum/BLIK/Twint/SIBS operator data, Irish payments press on Synch).
Sources
ResearchFloat — "How Wallets Reach the Terminal", July 2026 (full report available alongside this piece)
