The EcoCash ecosystem by the numbers; 6M subscribers, 26k agents, 20k merchants

Picture: EcoCash’s Eddie Chibi presents

We attended the Agent Banking & Digital Financial Services  conference today where mobile money service providers presented on the impact the services they have rolled out. Presenting for Ecocash, Business Development lead, Eddie Chibi, shared the statistics of the EcoCash ecosystem.

Most of this is not new ofcourse but we thought having it shared in one place makes it easier for most of you (and us here) to reference.

First the EcoCash subscriber number

• A total 6 million EcoCash customers
• 1.5m EcocashSave Account holders
• 1.2m Registered EcoSure customers
• Thousands using EcoCashMukando (This is the mobile money the savings club service launched last year. Unfortunately Chibi didn’t share the exact numbers and it’s also not clear if thousands refers to savings groups, or individuals in the groups)

The EcoCash Agent Network

• 26,000 Ecocash agents
• 20,000 Ecocash merchants
• 2,000 EcoCash brand ambassadors
• Update: 10,000 Steward Bank Point of Sale devices (you can do EcoCash merchant payments on these)
• 1,200 EcoCash green kiosks
• 3,114 billers & payroll partners
• 250 EcoCash/Econet branded shops
• 35,000 airtime vendors (Not directly related to EcoCash ofcourse, but a good to know number all the same. In fact, these haven’t yet quite been absorbed into the EcoCash network and are somewhat threatened by it directly as people buy airtime via EcoCash)

These numbers are not a shocker as I’m sure most of your readers that go to remote areas have been pleasantly surprised to find an unexpected EcoCash agent booth deep in rural Zimbabwe. It’s impressive that the company has developed an agent network so wide.

The numbers also show clearly the work that competing mobile money services like Telecash, OneWallet and lately GetCash have to do if they are not to resign to the winner takes all structure that it is right now.