By: Basel Khaled - Muhammad Al-Khouli

The International Association of Mobile Networks GSMA issued its annual index of regulations for electronic wallets for mobile phones for the year 2020, where the international ranking of the National Telecommunications Regulatory Authority in Egypt of the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology advanced 43 places to become 36th among 90 countries that adopt this type of services globally compared to Egypt ranked 79th in 2019, thus achieving the highest growth rate in the index worldwide.

The NTRA also ranked second in the Middle East and North Africa, where the value of the index rose to 81 points in 2020, compared to 69 points in 2019, and this comes within the framework of the NTRA's vision to develop the Egyptian ICT market and services provided to it to become one of the markets The global leader, as the index aims to measure the effectiveness of the controls and rules applied to electronic wallets opened on mobile phones in the global telecommunications markets, and their suitability and impact on the spread and use of the service.

It is worth noting that the evaluation is carried out through several main axes, the most important of which are the organizational structure of service provision, which is concerned with the ease of procedures for opening and using portfolios, the proliferation axis, which is concerned with the availability of available outlets for user access to services, and the axis of the maximum limits for financial transactions executed on the portfolios.

Engineer Hossam El-Gamal, CEO of the National Telecom Regulatory Authority, explained that the improvement of Egypt’s international ranking in the index of regulations for the work of electronic wallets for mobile phones comes in line with the state’s strategy in supporting the process of digital transformation and financial inclusion, and is a result of the efforts, initiatives and regulatory frameworks issued by the NTRA during 2020, which The most prominent of these was facilitating the procedures for opening and registering wallets and expanding their range of uses, increasing the maximum limits for daily operations using electronic wallets from 6 thousand pounds to 30 thousand pounds, increasing the maximum limits for monthly operations from 50 thousand pounds to 100 thousand pounds, and coordinating with mobile companies to cancel any commissions on Transfers from any mobile phone wallet to another.

The agency had issued a report for the first half of 2021 on indicators of the use of electronic wallets for mobile phones, where the total number of electronic wallets reached 16.3 million wallets at the level of the Republic, and the number of operations executed reached 81 million electronic transactions, and by comparing the results of the report between the first half of 2021 and the first half For the year 2020, it was noted that the indicators of the use of electronic wallets increased by 175% in the number of transactions carried out using wallets, by 300% in the number of transfers from one wallet to another, by 132% in the number of withdrawals, and by 109% in the number of deposits.

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