Our objective is to increase the number of monthly active users, in other words, subscribers who pay from a Kyivstar mobile phone balance on a monthly basis.

The cost per transaction from a mobile phone balance is many times lower than that of bank cards. We have neither interchange nor commission fees from payment systems.

We, mobile operators, can offer the market the same transactions at much lower costs. This is wonderful, but you cannot extrapolate Kyiv on the rest of the country. I see many people in Kyiv paying via GooglePay or ApplePay in large supermarkets. It is still too early to talk about mobile financial services becoming a tool for growing financial inclusion.Īs regards bank cards, 50% of transactions in Ukraine are now cashless, although their lion's share is taken up by p2p transfers, rather than by retail transactions or in-store card payments. In other words, e‑money accounts for only 0.3% of the entire turnover, and, even then, the lion's share in this figure is taken by interwallet transfers. According to the National Bank's statistics, the total volume of e-money transactions in the first half of 2019 amounted to UAH 4.9bn, whereas the six-month turnover on bank cards was almost UAH 1.7trn. The market currently lacks strong mobile financial services or high-profile FinTech projects. To be honest, working in the Ukrainian market is more challenging, but at the same time is highly promising.

Starmoney 2