Tawanda Musarurwa
INVOICE discounting can close a funding gap that has locked small businesses out of credit for decades, CBZ Holdings and the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange said, noting that the requisite money is available in Zimbabwe.
Local banks hold US$7,1 billion in deposits, but three in every four businesses cannot access it.
Mr Lawrence Nyazema, group chief executive of CBZ Holdings and his ZSE Holdings counterpart, Mr Justin Bgoni, said this at the Zimbabwe Entrepreneurship Exchange (ZEEX) Connect, a supply-chain finance forum, in Harare on yesterday.
The event, which was organised by Zimpapers (1980) Group, sought to unpack the ZEEX, the ZSE’s new capital-raising venue for small and medium enterprises (SMEs).
Its invoice-discounting marketplace allows suppliers to sell approved invoices to financiers for immediate cash.
The buyer then pays the investor at maturity.
The platform’s target is to raise and distribute at least US$10 million in the roughly two and a half months to year-end.
Mr Nyazema said that is only a start. “For 2027, I’m not thinking of tens of millions of US dollars, because the potential is more than a billion if we get it right,” he said.
The problem that needs to be resolved is significant. Zimbabwe has 204 798 business establishments, according to official figures presented at the forum, but only 2 031 are large and formal entities.
About 155 900 businesses are informal, or 76,1 percent of the total. Mr Bgoni said SMEs contribute about 60 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), but remain largely underfunded. The ZSE chief executive’s presentation listed the barriers: bank lending skewed towards large corporates, heavy collateral demands, foreign-currency scarcity and listing thresholds on the ZSE and VFEX that are out of reach for small firms.
Invoice discounting sidesteps the collateral problem, Mr Nyazema argued.
A micro-enterprise rarely holds title deeds, but it often holds a valid invoice owed by a sound buyer.
For a small supplier, he said, “the dead capital is the receivable”.
The goods are delivered and the invoice is valid, yet the cash sits 30, 60 or 90 days away.
“Time is the most expensive collateral a small business is ever asked to post,” he said in his presentation.
Mr Bgoni said the exchange is designed so that “to develop a large company, we have to have a solution for SMEs”.
He said the project had drawn strong backing from the Government, business and the SME community and that the aim was to make it easy and cheaper for SMEs to raise money.
Mr Nyazema rejected the argument that Zimbabwe lacks capital raising capacity. “So, why do we continue to make arguments that we don’t have capital, we don’t have foreign currency and the economy is unstable? The statistics prove us wrong,” he said. Bank deposits, he noted, fell to US$2 billion after the 2018–2019 currency reforms.
They stood at US$7,1 billion in August this year, at least US$1,5 billion of it with CBZ.
“That’s the reason you see me bragging about putting together US$135 million for a gold mine. Five years ago, we didn’t have that capacity,” he said.
Banks’ loans and advances were about US$3,79 billion in June, a loan-to-deposit ratio of 54 percent.
He said the deposit base is built on gold dividends, platinum group metals and “real economic activity”.
Official figures cited in his presentation show a record 2025 gold output of 46,7 tonnes and US$4,1 billion in gold export receipts in the first eight months of 2026.
Foreign-currency inflows to banks reached US$15,9 billion between January and September 2026, up 33,7 percent against the same period last year.
Inflation has stayed below 5 percent this year, and the policy rate has been cut from 35 percent to 27,5 percent since June.
Mr Nyazema then turned to the informal economy, which he estimated at no less than US$40 billion.
His presentation put it at about US$42 billion (or 64 percent of GDP).
“To those who still keep cash under their mattresses and in safe deposit boxes … our appeal is: please bring the US$2 or US$3 billion so that, instead of me talking about the US$7 billion banking sector, it becomes a US$10 billion banking sector,” he said.
“There is no way we can keep that US$40 billion outside capital provisions.”
Mr Nyazema listed the risks that could stall the market. The first is a “commitment gap”: large corporates must join, because it is their invoices that will be discounted.
“If they stay away from the exchange, we will not get it right,” he said.
The second is public-sector payment delays. He welcomed “significant improvement” in public receivables this year, but warned that late payment by the economy’s biggest buyer sets the payment culture for everyone else.
Third is the eventual move to a single currency, which must be managed “so that we do not have currency mismatches on the platform”.
Gold prices and weather were also flagged, with El Niño threatening the 2026/27 season.
He also appealed to regulators not to make formalisation too costly for informal operators.
And the sharpest warning was about fraud. Mr Nyazema pointed to the example of a US auto-parts company suspected of defrauding lenders through invoice discounting, with allegations of duplicated invoices.
“For us to be a billion-dollar industry, let’s stay away from such practices,” he said, urging SMEs that “integrity is going to be the most important feature”.
“One large fraud can reset trust for a decade,” he said.
ZEEX’s backers say groundwork is advancing. The ZSE has signed five institutional partnerships in four months, among them SMEDCO, Invesci and Red Sphere.
Its pipeline holds more than 30 prospective issuers, and over 15 sponsors have been onboarded.
Zimplow Holdings and Windmill (Pvt) Ltd are in early talks as potential originators of receivables. Trades settle automatically, with token transfer and cash moving together, which the ZSE says removes settlement risk.
A bond holding company will hold collateral on investors’ behalf.
Mr Nyazema proposed three steps: large buyers in retail, manufacturing and agriculture confirm their suppliers’ invoices; banks, pension funds and private investors commit funding and regulators clarify how the invoices count as investable assets.
Pension assets stood at US$3,47 billion and diaspora remittances reached US$1,86 billion in the first eight months of the year.
Mr Nyazema said the African Continental Free Trade Area, covering about 1,6 billion people, could add US$450 billion in income by 2035 if fully implemented.
“I would hate it for us as Zimbabwe to miss that particular opportunity,” he said.
