CABS, one of the 6 local financial institutions that have been piloting the Zimswitch Vpayments online payments platform, is now rolling out the service to merchants after getting approval from the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ). A report in the Zimbabwe Independent today confirms that local internet provider Dandemutande, which piloted the service with CABS for about 18 months, has started selling its uMAX internet bundles online using Vpayments. CABS is the first local financial institution to go live with the platform.
Vpayments will enable retailers to offer their goods and services to their customers through website shopping carts rather than the traditional brick-and-mortar stores. When we interviewed CABS MD, Kevin Terry recently, he confirmed that they had received regulatory approval to go live.
Vpayments was developed over the past few years as part of the Zimswitch Shared Services platform, an integrated system for payments via mobile, the internet, Point of Sale devices, and traditional branch based banking.
A CABS spokesperson we spoke to today told us there are already signing on merchants, starting with local retailers from whom they are apparently “expecting a very positive response.” It’s not clear yet how ready they are to accept tech startup companies that typically don’t have any physical shop presence and whose potential traction is not clear.
Our experience with the launch of such technical products is that in the early days, unless trained exhaustively already to respond accurately and help clients that have varying technical needs, most staff of the bank will not be clear how to assist new customers.
So yes, Mr. tech-startup-founder-working-on-Zimbabwe’s-Amazon, we don’t recommend showing up at a random CABS branch and bombarding their information desk with demands for Vpayments. The CABS spokesperson we spoke to offered that interested ‘retailers’ should contact the CABS POS Team on +263 4 883823 – 60, or email them on help.pos [at] cabs.co.zw
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8 comments
Will be interesting when people start implementing this on their sites. It’s one thing to allow a team of highly trained “Giraffes” to implement it it’s another to make it accessible to everyone on all platforms, and yes Joomla should be one of those platforms…
highly trained giraffes, rofl!!!
This should be very interesting for the Zim landscape.
the introduction of online payments in zimbabwe is long overdue, way to go CABS. But techies should realise that having an ecommerce website is not a magic wand to success. What you sell is a product/service if thats good then you will benefit from this development. South Africa has had online payments for a while but there is the issue of uptake with the majority of people who tend to be wary of paying via online channels. There is also the issue of fraud (people buying and not seeing the products). And then there are issues of security of the system, we have seen how easy it has been for hackers to pull down zimbabwean websites, so it figures.
Better late than never.
Any Info on requirements to be a ‘merchant’?
[…] goes live vPayments, ZimSwitch’s internet payment gateway went live in January with the launch of Utande and CABS’s new internet payment option. Vpayments basically allows banked individuals in Zimbabwe to make payments from their accounts on […]
[…] and services from us here as we do not have the ability to open a merchant account. Something vPayments already allows. If your product or service targets locals that are based here, then nicely start putting those […]