How Electrosales Zimbabwe Cracked a Major Retail Problem with One Simple Fintech Solution

Despite all of its flaws and troubles, Zimbabwe is an excellent case study nation for the length and breadth of digital financial services “innovation”. If you were wondering why innovation is in quotation marks, it is mainly because, for some readers across the world, what is to come is not necessarily new, or can even be termed innovative. However, within the Zimbabwean context, it most certainly is. We will be dissecting Powerspeed Zimbabwe’s subsidiary, Electrosales, a hardware store that we believe has learned some valuable lessons that led it to introduce its Benefits Card.

What this card does is excruciatingly simple. All it aims to accomplish is to offer customers points on their purchases and, more importantly, greater flexibility for its stores and customers when getting change, particularly for customers paying physical United States Dollars. As many of you may already be aware, the USD is legal tender in Zimbabwe because of severe currency collapses that the country has experienced over the last couple of decades. 

The relative stability of the USD has led it to become the store of value of choice for many Zimbabweans. This is because there have been four versions of a local currency that have come and gone in recent memory  (redenominated to ZWN in 2005, ZWR in 2008, ZWL in 2009 and ZWG/ZiG in 2024). 

It is not the right time to argue why this is so, but the common denominator of a local currency situation that is in constant flux, is that many Zimbabweans cannot place confidence in any local fiat currency until it has attained a similar level of stability as the USD or, maybe it can be argued, regional currencies.