An announcement that has come through from Econet, the owners of the Ecocash services company is that they have reduced their merchant merchant fees for their customers by as much as 50% with immediate effect.

This is a follow-on to their no merchant fees on Thursdays initiative that they ran from April up toend of June, though no data is available as to how successful that campaign was, a reduction in fees will come as a sigh of relief to Ecocash users who are also affected by the heavy cash crisis currently affecting Zimbabwe.

With a staggering 27,000 possible merchants, the biggest mobile money payment solution, which I refer to as a bank, is making concerted efforts in order to keep customer funds within their ecosystem, which will hopefully see customers not ditching Ecocash due to the challenges one is sometimes faced with.

In their announcement, Ecocash has not made mention of exact figures of the new fees, well update as soon as those are available, but for a $1 payment one can expect to pay only 1c (Id presume that the fine print here is that Ecocash will only charge 1c, while there is a 5c transaction fee tax imposed by the Government).

These reductions in transaction fees should see customers opting to pay through Ecocash, hopefully, with some kind of effort being put towards bringing on more shops, restaurants, fuel filling stations and other places one usually needs to pay, reducing ones desire for cash.

Do you foresee yourself using your Ecocash account more than you have been after this announcement? If not, what would you say would need to be done in order for you to make Ecocash (or any other non-cash option for that matter) your default means of payment?

Excerpt from:

Ecocash Attempts To Keep It All In Their Ecosystem - Technology Zimbabwe