Standard Chartered Link With Ecocash Service Goes Live Today

Today marks the day that the linking of Ecocash accounts and Standard Chartered(StanChart) accounts is finally going live. Previously, it had been announced about such an arrangement but the platform wasn’t yet operational. Zimbabwe’s oldest financial institution and the largest mobile money transfer platform are teaming up to increase service provision to their respective customers. StanChart, like any other big institution had lagged to link its banking services with Ecocash.

Why was StanChart late to link with Ecocash?

Persistent cash shortages and the widespread use of mobile money services could have prompted StanChart to link with Ecocash. A lot of people are now using Ecocash relative to banking services of decorated banks like StanChart.

Banks like Stanchart were only left to process company accounts and transactions of huge sums, which are not frequently done compared to household accounts of Ecocash users.

The demise of many companies and the scaling down of operations by many companies in Zimbabwe consequently led to a reduction of companies use of banking services which were StanChart’s high value customers. In light of that, Ecocash accounting of over 95% of the mobile money services which are predominantly used by household customers proved to be a new source of value for StanChart to tap into regardless of the low value of individual transactions relative to company accounts transactions.

So increasing transaction value and quantity could be the reason StanChart has finally choosen to harmonize its banking services with Ecocash. This is just my conjecture of course…