ECONET Wireless will be launching EcoCash Remittance South Africa, in early October that will allow Zims in SA being able to send money home.
According to the mobile giant’s Chief Executive Officer Douglas Mboweni Zimbabweans in South Africa will be able to send money home securely, cheaply in a matter of seconds.
“This has taken a long time to put in place but we are almost there. It will be the biggest thing that has happened to EcoCash since it was first launched,” says Mboweni.
The service will only be available to Zim who have an Econet Wireless SA Sim cards, known as “Call Home” powered by local cellphone service provider Cell C.
Econet says almost a million Zims are currently using its Call Home service.
Econet and its partners have received approval from the SA authorities and are nearing completion of a “successful soft launch”
Mboweni said the company has been working with its South African partners since the beginning of August on a two hundred customer “soft launch” of the new direct to EcoCash remittance service; training registration agents, enabling and verifying the interlinked systems and ensuring regulatory compliance of the end to end process.
Mboweni says his company has partnered with its massively popular EcoCash service with a South African company called Flash Mobile Vending, a subsidiary of retail giant Pepkor, whose mobile vending solution is used by more than 60 000 informal sector small business shop owners throughout South Africa
Flash shop owners are spread throughout South Africa; operating from locations convenient to the vast majority of the Zimbabwean Diaspora who are the source of vital remittances supporting loved ones in Zimbabwe.
“Flash’s vast footprint of shop owners, easily spotted by virtue of their distinctive “green cow” logo, will effectively act as EcoCash agents for remittance “cash-in” transactions,” Mboweni added.
In addition to this , Flash plans to mobilize all PEP and PEP cell stores across South Africa to perform registrations and accept remittance “cash-in extends EcoCash Zimbabwe’s agent footprint from Beitbridge to Cape Town and all parts in between.
Mboweni says that the advantages of EcoCash remittances will be that money is transferred goes in seconds and one can send as little as R50.
” It will also be very cheap compared to other forms of remittance because Econet and Flash are volume players,” says Mboweni.
