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Telecommunications companies across Africa and Latin America spend $15-21 billion annually on customer retention programs. According to GSMA Intelligence's State of the Industry Report, telcos in Sub-Saharan Africa lose up to 67% of their customers each year, despite spending 10-14% of their revenue on customer retention efforts. Meanwhile, these same customers desperately need financial services that traditional banks often fail to provide.
The fix might already exist. Every smartphone in Lagos or Lima contains more processing power than major banks had twenty years ago. Yet telecom companies use them only for calls and data, missing a massive opportunity to transform these devices into financial infrastructure.
However, three global trends are occurring to encourage an expansion and stickiness of the services telcos provide:
First, 2 billion people are getting connected for the first time, mostly through smartphones in developing countries. The ITU reports that 2.1 billion people remain unconnected or under-connected globally, with 96% in developing nations. But unlike early internet users who dealt with dial-up and basic websites, today's new users get immediate access to sophisticated applications and stable networks.
Second, these markets altogether skip the traditional banking evolution. The World Bank's Global Findex Database shows 1.4 billion adults remain unbanked, concentrated in regions where mobile money already dominates. Rural Colombia never built bank branches. Nigerian villages never installed ATMs. So when mobile payments arrived, people switched from cash directly to digital money without the friction of introducing banks or changing established habits.
"The mobile industry has never been more important to the world's citizens and economy," says Mats Granryd, Director General of GSMA. "Mobile money is a game-changer for the financial inclusion of women and other underserved groups. It provides a gateway to a wider range of financial services, including savings, credit, and insurance, which can help people build resilience and improve their livelihoods."
Third, global financial control has begun to fragment. The Bank for International Settlements found that only 3 of 114 central bank digital currency pilots have actually launched, with most failing due to technical problems and poor adoption. BRICS nations built their own payment systems. Some countries added Bitcoin to their national reserves. The old centralized system no longer holds sway.
Chris Surdak, CEO of ReLeaf Financial, puts it bluntly: "The World Bank, the World Economic Forum, CBDCs, all were aligning to constrain free market adoption of cryptocurrency..After decades of dipping our toes in these waters, people are now ready to cross the crypto Rubicon in force."
Most people haven't considered the possibility of earning money while their smartphones sit idle. However, ReLeaf developed a patent-pending system called "Proof of Intent" that turns phones into transaction validators. When someone in Peru sends money to their family, phones in Colombia could verify the transaction. Phone owners can earn small cryptocurrency rewards that add up to cover data plans, airtime, or groceries -- thereby potentially solving the loyalty and retention problem.
"There are billions of people living on three or four dollars a day if they're lucky," Surdak explains. "How can you meaningfully exist today without being digitally connected? ReLeaf makes both happen at the same time."
Claro, a major Latin American telecom, calculated that there is over $350 million in potential new revenue out there over the next five years, with significantly lower churn. This doesn't even require any new infrastructure, just software updates to existing apps.
Dante Disparte, Chief Strategy Officer at Circle, sees broader implications: "In many parts of the world, having access to a stable currency is not a given. Stablecoins can provide a safe and reliable store of value for people in countries with high inflation or political instability." He adds that stablecoins are programmable, which "opens up a whole new world of possibilities for financial services in emerging markets, from micropayments and remittances to decentralized finance applications."
David Chaum, the inventor of digital cash in the 1980s and creator of much of the encryption that protects modern transactions, warned about surveillance capitalism decades before Facebook existed. Yet he just joined ReLeaf's strategy team.
"ReLeaf is what I have always dreamed that cryptocurrency would be," Chaum says. "A win for telcos, retailers, and consumers."
Coming from the man who founded DigiCash in 1989 and whose patents enable every secure transaction today, this means something. Chaum wanted regular people to control their money without surveillance or permission. He imagined cryptography empowering individuals, not corporations. After forty years, he sees it happening through ReLeaf's approach: phones earning money for their owners without tracking or central control.
Traditional banks in New York or London can't pull this off. They face centuries of regulations, customers expecting physical branches, and systems held together with outdated COBOL code. Emerging markets don't have that baggage.
In Kenya, M-PESA proved it. One telecom company, using basic phones and zero banking infrastructure, now processes half of Kenya's GDP. The GSMA's 2024 Mobile Money report reveals that global mobile money transactions exceeded $1 trillion, with Africa accounting for 70% of that volume.
Elizabeth Rossiello, CEO of AZA Finance, stresses the need for local solutions: "Africa is not a country. It's a continent of 54 different countries, each with its own regulatory environment, its own currency, its own challenges, and its own opportunities. You can't have a one-size-fits-all approach."
She's watched the transformation firsthand: "The future of payments in Africa is mobile. We've seen a huge leapfrog effect, where many people have skipped the traditional banking system and gone straight to mobile money. This has created a massive opportunity for innovation in the digital payments space."
Business and technology leaders should consider four realities:
In short, forget about "banking the unbanked" or "the last mile." Banks could become irrelevant for more than a billion new mobile customers. Also, abandon global playbooks; instead build specific solutions for specific markets. Finally, move now. While committees debate and consultants analyze, hundreds of millions of people with smartphones still need financial services. Those dots are being connected quickly.
Telecommunications companies in emerging markets already have everything they need: customers, infrastructure, and trust. They just need to recognize that phones can do more than make calls. Those who understand this opportunity could become the financial backbone in which every smartphone becomes a tiny bank, every user becomes an earner, and every village becomes part of the network.
The last quarter of humanity joining the digital economy won't wait for JP Morgan Chase, Citibank, HSBC, or Deutsche Bank to notice them. They're building something new, using the phones already in their pockets. Some telcos and innovators will own this transformation, while others will spend years trying to catch up.