So last week we woke to the exciting news that the Ecocash Debit card was back. Instead of using your normal Ecocash balance as it did back in the day it will suckle from your FCA balance. We were even able to generate a VCN although since we had nothing in our FCA wallet we could not link the VCN with PayPal.
A lot of people got in touch upon the news that the Ecocash MasterCard service was back wanting to know how they could sign up. Well here is some bad news according to Econet ( eerr Cassava Smartech now) the VCN service is only available to those people who signed up before it was suspended. If you had a physical MasterCard back then it means you can generate a VCN and use it to pay online.
How to generate a VCN?
- Dial *151#
- Enter our pin
- Select option 7 Wallet services
- Select option 1 Ecocash Debit Card
- Select option 2 Ecocash -Virtual Card
- Select option 1 Request VCN
- Type four letters which you haven’t used before
- Review details and select 1 Submit Request
Option 7 has always been a little stupid to me. I cannot fathom it’s use and find it confusing. There aren’t many four letter words out there (I suck at scrabble what can I say) and you will be quickly forced to using random letter combinations which you are likely to forget.
You can also use the data app ( I highly recommend it) to generate a VCN.
Why people love the Ecocash card
There is no shortage of prepaid cards that you can prefund and use to make online payments but the Ecocash card is pretty convenient. For me it was the fact that the VCN expires. I liked to use it with those services that like to auto renew my subscription without asking me and it worked like a charm as the VCN would expire after 14 days.
In fact you can generate different VCN’s for different services. However to make withdrawals and POS payments you will need to have the physical MasterCard. It is not clear whether Cassava is giving these out to customers as even the cards of people who had signed up for the service before it went away are likely to have expired.
