BancABC has launched a local remittance service called City Hopper. This service will allow customers to send foreign currency between cities in Zimbabwe instantly. City Hopper will be available to all customers whether they are a BankABC customer or not.
‘We are launching the City Hopper – a domestic remittance service to address the nationwide challenge of sending foreign currency across the country for the wider public or for those who want to support their families or pay for goods and services and other business activities in foreign currency’.
Lance Mambondiani, CEO BancABC
Anyone can walk into a BancABC branch and transfer a sum as low US$10. The sender will only have to produce their I.D number, phone number and address on the deposit slip. The receiver can access the transferred funds instantly and will have to produce their ID and reference number in order to cash out the funds.
City Hopper will be available at BancABC branches nationwide. The service will also be available at Pick’n’Pay kiosks starting with the one Pick’n’Pay Aspindale where BancABC already has a presence. Plans are well underway to expand to more Pick’n’Pay stores nationwide.
Similar to international remittance services like Western Union, Money Gram, and World Remit. City Hopper aims to provide another avenue that individuals can send and receive USD through formal channels but locally.
There are services like Mukuru that offer city to city remittance. The competitiveness of City Hopper will be determined by the charges for local transfers. But as an addition to the current services already on offer this, in my opinion, just increases the convenience for the public, and that’s a massive plus.
At the time of publishing we didn’t know what the charges for the service would be but we wrote a follow-up article with those. Check it out here.
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7 comments
This is a pretty nice niche they found. If the fees are tolerable it could be genuinely useful.
What’s the percentage on the charges like ?
Well done Dr Lance and team.
How are they going to manage the small change issue
They will probably put the burden on the receiver like what Econet World Remit does and threaten not to serve you if you don’t have the small change! But I suppose, if the sender, who I assume bears teh cost of sending the forex, pays teh charges from their side, the small change issue shouldn’t be much of a problem for the receiver as in the World Remit Ecocash case. Whats strange about Ecocash’s World Remit is that charges are levied on both the international sender and the local receiver. I asked why, and was given a lot of complex evasive explanations and their service is bad. Ecocash’s World Remit or World Remit’s Ecocash, even took advantage of the Corona Virus to make their service worse.
Way to go! They have adressed a need. With good fees they can grow the service!
I like this. This also resolves a problem of getting hard currency to a relative in another part of the country.