Bharti Airtel, which last week confirmed its intention to bid for an Indian banking licence, used its Q3 results to show how it feels about such services in Africa.

It’s early days for the operator’s Airtel Money service but it is making inroads in Africa, where its total base increased to 6.2 million (end-December 2014) from 2.7 million a year earlier.

Bharti Airtel has a presence in 20 countries including India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, as well as 17 countries in Africa.

Bear in mind, however, that the operator has a total customer base of 313 million across the 20 countries, which shows how the take-up of money services still has a long way to go.

The operator does not reveal how much revenue (or profit) is generated by mobile money but its Q3 figures show the total value of transactions it handled was $2.93 billion, a 71 per cent increase over the previous year.

And the total number of transactions during the quarter grew twofold to 160 million, compared to 73 million in the same quarter in 2013.

Bharti Airtel’s net profit in Q3 was INR14.37 billion ($232 million), more than double its performance a year earlier.  Revenue was INR232 billion, up from INR219 billion in Q3 2013.