Mobile app marketing company Adjust has published a new report looking at a range of statistics for mobile apps globally.

One of the sections of the report looks at finance apps specifically, with some interesting data laid out for readers.

This includes a look at the most popular finance apps globally in 2024. The most striking factor here was that almost all of the downloads were for emerging market payments, banking, and cryptocurrency firms.

According to the Adjust report, the top 10 finance app downloads were:

1. PhonePe
2. Google Pay
3. PayPal
4. Paytm
5. DANA
6. Binance
7. Nubank
8. ShopeePay
9. Tonkeeper
10. Bajaj Finserv

The report appears to not capture Chinese data, which would probably change those rankings.

Nevertheless, it’s notable that PhonePe and Paytm are both Indian e-payments firms.

The same is true of DANA, which is Indonesian. ShopeePay is also a payments company and is focused on the ASEAN region as a whole.

Meanwhile, Tonkeeper and Binance are – readers probably don’t reminding – crypto firms. Both have a presence that skews heavily to emerging markets. For example, Tonkeeper’s largest sources of traffic, according to SimilarWeb, are Russia, Germany, Vietnam, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan.

The only banking apps on the list, Nubank and Bajaj Finserv, are also emerging market focused. Nubank’s main markets are Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico. Bajaj is another Indian company.

The downloads are an indicator of why so many brokers today are able to target emerging markets. Growing banking and payments infrastructure, along with the widespread adoption of smartphones, has made people much easier to reach than they were one or two decades ago.

At the same time, it is a sign of the broad reach and appeal that crypto has. Adjust noted that crypto apps rose 45% last year compared to 2023. It is fairly remarkable that a somewhat nondescript crypto company, in the form of Tonkeeper, was one of the most-downloaded finance apps in the entire world in 2024.