Though Steward Bank didn’t end up launching Sosholoza live on their Facebook page the cat is now out of the bag. They uploaded a video explaining how Sosholoza will work and I must say WhatsApp banking is pretty exciting! One thing that caught my eye, however, is the fact that mobile money users will now be able to use this chatbot to send money directly to each other. Yes, you’ll now be able to send money from your EcoCash wallet to your OneMoney wallet directly without any need for an agent and that’s pretty cool.
So how does this work? Well, first you have to add Sosholoza to your contacts before you can interact on WhatsApp and the number you want to save is +263777222333. If you save this number and text Hi on WhatsApp and choose Sosholoza from your list of options you’ll get the following options:
- Wallet to Any Bank
- Any Bank To Any Wallet
Now bank to wallet transactions are very common but if once you select the first option you’ll be asked to select the bank you want to send to. Interestingly (or wrongly as some may point out) OneMoney and Telecash are among the banks you can send to. Now I understand that these two are not banks by any means but the fact that the two mobile money operators are part of Zimswitch’s network and the ZIPIT system makes them very bank-like.
Anyway, the next step will prompt you to select the wallet from which you are sending from and you can select EcoCash. Thus you can now send money from EcoCash to the other mobile operators’ mobile money wallets and the best part is you can do so from WhatsApp.
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I would like to commend Steward Bank for the social banking product and their continual innovations. What I commend them the most (above ingenuity), is their willingness and readiness to pour in marketing funds to support any new product launch. The ingenuity of the innovation is propelled a hundred fold due to their immense marketing budget. Their marketing budget must also somehow include a healthy funding of Techzim. As a technology magazine, you would expect an honest and unbiased scrutiny of any such innovation. For someone techsavvy, they would know that what Steward Bank have done is availing interoperability at a cost to the subscriber/customer. ZIPIT has been available on this market for years, which allows for B2W and W2B on USSD – which Telecash, One Money and other banks have always had.
The Sosholoza Chatbot is merely a link to the ZIPIT menu which allows for transfers to and from all banking partners of ZimSwitch. But, here is the catch – being an Econet Group company, they had to collect revenue somehow for their parent company. A subscriber is having to be charged data prices for a product that is otherwise available on USSD – ZIPIT that is. What is the smartphone penetration in the country? How many people will afford Sosholoza – the smartphone and the requisite data in tow? Very soon, you will see the parent company of Steward Bank launching a “social banking data bundle”…boy, these guys can monitize their synergies [round of applause].
Anyway, I do not have anything against anyone who is able to hoodwink the market into believing that they have brought genuine technology and convenience, when in fact they have asked you to pay for what you already had [selling ice to the Eskimo]. Shame however on those who are “naive” enough to fall for it and WORSE is for a journo who loses their morals and misleads the market worse than the pseudo innovator. A genuine journo would have cut through the “bs” and showed the world that this is ZIPIT via the expensive backdoor. They would have gone further to assess genuine convenience, the cost of the solution to the customer and go on to check if there are no similar products…if any, they would go on to compare the value per time or per dollar.
Kudos to Steward and the Econet Group as a whole – they’ve presented themselves (and successfully if I may add) to the market as opinion leaders, as innovators yet all they have managed is to monitize interoperability, create an exclusive empire and drum it up our ears until we have all believed and some of us believe to zombie like levels :):):)
Applaud…..