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Business Reporter
AS Zimbabwe’s cash situation remains constrained, Stanbic Bank Zimbabwe is innovating around digitalising all of its transactions.
The school fees season has inspired the bank to add 60 more schools to the already existing 69 schools on their mobile banking platform, an initiative which has been running since September 2017.
Most parents previously relied on cash payments for school fees. However, with the prevailing shortages other options such as RTGS and POS are becoming more popular.
Stanbic Bank’s digital school fees payments and collections solution is aimed at easing the time-consuming and costly process of queuing up in banking halls to pay fees.
Mr Patson Mahachi, who heads personal and business banking at Stanbic, explained how the bank’s partnership with various early learning, primary, secondary and tertiary institutions, is set to benefit customers and the various schools on their mobile banking platform.
“The foundation of this initiative is the relationships we have with different educational institutions, which we have leveraged to benefit our personal customers when it comes to payment of tuition, and the schools are guaranteed of a systematic collections strategy,” said Mr Mahachi.
He said school fees payment transactions on their platform are priced at a cost that is 87.5 percent cheaper than that of making an RTGS and the school fees were collected at no charge to the school.
“Our aim is to simplify banking and our pricing on this specific set of transactions is sensitive to a lot of factors for both the customer and the school. For example, when the customer makes the payment from wherever they are in the country, both the school and the parent get the benefit of being immediately notified by a system alert and SMS respectively,” said Mr Mahachi.
Once the school receives the notification, he said, they were able to print a receipt for the student off the system. In addition, the system allows for automated reconciliations of collections, which helps eliminate forgeries and reduce wasteful administrative costs such as paperwork.
“The school is able to extract various forms of reports on the fees collected and the system also tackles the challenge of reconciliations for the school as each payment bears sufficient student details,” explained Mr Mahachi.
Financial institutions have been working on digital solutions to ensure that their customers can always access their money following the cash crisis, which has been distressing the country for almost two years now.
Online Reporter