SME Digital Payments in Zimbabwe Remain the Greatest Fintech Opportunity

Much has been done for Peer-to-Peer transactions in Zimbabwe, what with mobile money’s charge in the 2010s and what we have seen from Simbisa’s InnBucks and Old Mutual’s O’Mari in the sphere of digital wallets in the new decade. The emphasis of P2P transactions has created a reservoir of digital financial instruments that have stopped short at one important question: “It’s all well and good that there are more digital wallets, but where are people going to spend that money locally?”

Being able to pay for anything using digital payments in Zimbabwe, and particularly with SMEs, is hit or miss. You are more likely to need cash across the board than rely solely on digital payments, and this stretches from card payments to mobile money and digital wallets. 

Perhaps, to make the picture clearer, we need to take a step back. The context of why Zimbabwe is the way it is now is quite lengthy. However, there is a way to tell most of it with just one image.

What you are looking at is a graphical representation of how a country goes from widespread digital payments usage to a largely cash economy. The value of those transactions was indeed dwarfed by what was sent over Zimbabwe Real-Time Gross Settlement; however, on the whole, mobile and Point of Sale (POS) transactions represented consistently more than 75% of all transactions in the country over that period, in terms of volumes.

More than that, they reflect the level of usage that digital channels enjoyed. Mobile transactions, for example, fell 71.8% from their peak in Q3, 2019. Point of Sale (POS) volumes also fell from close to 99 million in the first quarter of 2019 by 76.4%, in under half a decade. 

The blame for this can be shared equally by Zimbabwe’s recurring economic struggles and regulations that systematically dismantled the utility of digital payments that were primarily targeted at mobile money.