Online Reporter
Business Reporter
The country’s digital payments ecosystem is sitting on vast infrastructure that remains largely underutilised, with transaction volumes declining despite significant investment, industry leaders have said.
Speaking during a panel discussion on the second day of the Zimswitch Payments Conference in Harare on Friday, executives from some of Zimbabwe’s leading financial institutions called for urgent collaboration to unlock the full potential of digital payments.
Ms Tatenda Tsikira of AFC Commercial Bank told delegates that the industry had made significant investments in payment infrastructure but was failing to extract value from it.
She illustrated the scale of underutilisation with a striking example: for every twenty thousand point-of-sale terminals acquired by a bank, only about two thousand were actually active.
She blamed fragmentation driven by excessive competition and called on the industry to share automation processes and infrastructure, warning that the proliferation of more than ten digital products was confusing customers rather than offering convenience.
Mr Irvine Masona of CABS delivered a stark warning about the impact of transaction taxes on digital adoption.
He noted that the Intermediated Money Transfer Tax now constituted more than sixty-seven percent of the transaction cost for the majority of digital payments, a burden that was driving customers back to cash.
He declared that until the digital dollar and the cash dollar had parity, no one would use the digital dollar. He also revealed that less than five percent of transactions processed through the national switch were conducted online, representing a massive untapped market.
Dr Lawrence Kupika of POSB turned the spotlight on small and medium enterprises, which he described as the backbone of the economy.
He cited data showing that SMEs employ approximately 3.4 million people yet access only 7.2 percent of available credit. He called for data-based lending using alternative data and artificial intelligence to onboard SMEs into the formal financial ecosystem.
Mr Thando Rupere of TN Cybertech Bank identified trust as the central unresolved issue holding back digital adoption.
Mr Andrew Tawodzera of AFC Holdings argued that banks knew more about their customers than any other industry yet failed to utilise that information effectively.
He contended that awareness was no longer the biggest challenge and that the real challenge was turning awareness into habit. He called on the industry to reward customer behaviour through loyalty programmes and cashback incentives and urged investment in digital literacy to build customer confidence.
The panel concluded that the industry must collaborate on infrastructure, address structural barriers including the IMTT burden, leverage data for lending, build trust through education, and simplify the customer experience with a one-wallet solution.
Zimswitch chief executive Mr Zabron Chilakalaka earlier reminded delegates that as an industry, they were being called to do more than innovate and were being challenged to deliver impact.
