Zimswitch needs to strike a balance between ZWL & USD e-commerce

Zimswitch has gained an ever more important role in the national economy over the last 11 months. It started with the company being designated as the National Switch which meant that EcoCash, which existed outside the payments establishment, was brought into the fold.

The folks at Zimswitch then doubled down on that announcement with two partnerships. The first was with Mastercard, the intended purpose of this was to expand digital payments in Zimbabwe. Visa was the next payments service to join forces with Zimswitch and from what we learned this was to support e-commerce in the country.

However, the two partnerships have been geared more towards foreign currency payments online. Now, this doesn’t make sense because there are far more local currency holders than those with a prepaid USD card or a NOSTRO account.

Granted the value of USD transactions is worth more but what of the local who wants to trade in both seamlessly. In this episode of Technikari, we talk about what Zimswitch is and what problem it is trying to solve in this era of interoperability and e-commerce.

We also talked about:

• What is e-commerce in the Zimbabwean context?
• Who does Zimswitch actually serve?
• Should Zimswitch rethink its business model and become more customer-facing?
• How Vpayments failed to capture the massive local e-commerce market.
• Are the banks an impediment to Zimswitch meeting merchant needs?

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