InnBucks is now selling Econet USD airtime: Game over for other vendors?

In news that really shouldn’t surprise anyone, Innbucks announced that it is now selling USD airtime.

The Gist:

• Is Econet/EcoCash coming to terms with InnBucks’ prominence by allowing a competitor to sell one of its top products?
• To every entrepreneur or business, InnBucks is giving us all a lesson in increasing the value proposition of a product.
• Innbucks still has some ways to go, if they do a few things they could corner the USD payments space.

If you weren’t expecting this, then you must have been living under a rock somewhere in Chirumanzu. The one thing other people and we saw when InnBucks launched was the massive uptake the service had and the myriad of applications that Zimbabweans were using it for.

The ceiling of what Simbisa’s InnBucks could do at the time was high because it was the unofficial USD payment method for online merchants and the question always stood as to what would happen when it launched its own payment gateway through the extensive network of Simbisa fast food chains that house the remittance service.

Innbucks starting with Econet USD Airtime is strange.

There was an unfounded assumption for the longest time that EcoCash and InnBucks were not the best of friends. They are indeed competitors because they both perform the same function of remitting money from points A to B. However, the difference between the two is that EcoCash weathered a time of far less tolerance for fintech, while InnBucks (albeit having its own issues with the RBZ) got a slap on the wrist in comparison to the former.

Also Read: EcoCash transaction limits: impact on the National Payments System in numbers

With the advent of the re-introduction of the United States Dollar as a means of buying goods and services legally, it was a race to see who could eat up the millions banked under people’s mattresses. We are not clairvoyant but when the storm that is InnBucks rolled through in 2021, it’s not hard to imagine that the folks at EcoCash called an “All hands Meeting” to deliberate how they were going to deal with this threat.

Now, for EcoCash to see the sister company (Econet) allowing the “competition” to sell one of its products (if not the main one) through its service demonstrates one of two things. The first is they are looking at the impact that InnBucks has had and they are seeing dollar signs more than anything else. Alternatively, they may have just given up trying to be the paper tiger in the InnBucks tempest.

Whatever the case might be, here we are… You can buy Econet USD Airtime with funds left over in your InnBucks wallet.

You can also buy NetOne airtime, OneFusion and OneFi

Increasing the value proposition and the fractional airtime problem

What this all means is that you have more use for your InnBucks wallet. Airtime might not seem like a big thing because what stops you from just getting airtime at the street corner or from the likes of PayNow and Click’n’Pay? The difference now is that you can now buy fifty cents which is a big deal.

Before this point the most you could do with your InnBucks was just to store change from buying pizza or chicken and chips. Now, you can use that leftover beyond just remittances.

If we seem too overly excited then maybe this scenario will better explain things. We may all have been in a position where we didn’t have airtime to make a call or access WhatsApp. This situation would be compounded by, let’s say, its near month end and funds are tight. Whatever money you have leftover might not be enough to communicate in what can be an emergency.

The cash in your InnBucks, before this point, was useless to you… Now you can buy half a dollar’s worth of airtime which could get you out of a sticky situation. Why this is important is that there isn’t a 50-cent airtime voucher on these streets by way of physical airtime scratch cards.

Those fractional values, albeit small, when matched up with high volumes increase the value proposition of having an InnBucks wallet for those who haven’t already joined the train as well as lining Simbisa pockets even further.

There are still some ways to go though…

This might all seem like an advert for InnBucks but the system is not perfect. Customers still don’t have:

• Bank to Wallet (tricky with the Intermediary Money Transfer Tax now applying to USD transactions. And how many people have foreign currency accounts anyway?)
• Interoperability with USD mobile money wallets and bank accounts. (Strange that InnBucks has been exempt from complying with the ZimSwitch as the Nation Switch directive of 2020)

Moreover, InnBucks starting to sell airtime in 2023 might mean that they are facing some considerable problems with integration for other payments like:

• Insurance (people queue to pay their Nyaradzo funeral cover in USD because packages can retail value)
• DStv (The most popular terrestrial entertainment service on the continent should have been a day 1 integration)
• Vehicle Licencing (at least having the option would be great)

The pace at which InnBucks is moving with integrating more payments is a little concerning because aside from remittances, what else where were Zimbabweans getting? It might be a case of, as earlier mentioned, they are struggling to get providers. However, the company that Simbisa is working with, Utility Warehouse, styles itself as a provider of the run-of-the-mill payment option on other service providers, gateways and banks. But it should be mentioned, that at the time of writing, the standalone application for Utility Warehouse, on the Play Store and App Store, is not leading to anything “downloadable”

It will be interesting to see what Simbisa has in store for the future… The only company it looks to compete with, besides EcoCash, is Southern Africa’s biggest neo-bank, Mukuru (but we’ll talk about this another time).