CABS’s mobile money (& cards) doing 250,000 transactions a month

We held an interview recently with CABS Managing Director Kevin Terry in which talked at length about the company’s development of its mobile money product Textacash. We will post the interview a bit later today (check back) but we thought we would just highlight some of CABS’s December 2012 mobile money statistics first.

• The financial institution had 75,000 mobile customers.
• The traditional banking customer base is about 200,000.
• Works out to about 27% of the company’s total banking customers
• Total transactions across CABS’s mobile card base were over 250,000. (CABS has a dual set-up where one would have the choice of using a mobile phone or a bank card.)
• Around the same time the previous year (2011), CABS was doing 95,000 transactions, representing about 160% growth year on year.
• The highest agent last month had 480 transactions and the average was 60.
• A lot of the transactions happen in traditional retailers, where customers are using cards to make purchases and get cash.

CABS, as you may know is a building society in Zimbabwe and one of the largest financial institutions locally. It’s mobile platform is based uses Zimswitch’s Shared Services technology making it possible for customers to access the account and make payments via POS, mobile, bank branches, as well as (hopefully to go live in the coming weeks) online. The customer’s account is linked to a ‘Lite’ bank account, which customers can get much quicker and easier (than the traditional bank account) from the bank’s branches.