EcoCash to leverage on digital, financial innovations

EcoCash Holdings Zimbabwe Limited says the fintech group will leverage on digital and financial innovations as it seeks opportunities that drive growth and consolidate its market share.

Generally, the economy is embracing digitalization, which was spurred by the outbreak of the Covid -19 pandemic.

The digitalisation drive across business units also comes at a time the country is looking at narrowing the financial inclusion gap as well as the digital divide.

For EcoCash, providing digital solutions to everyday challenges also helps the group improve its earnings performance despite a challenging business environment.

“While the business environment remains challenging, the group is committed to delivering value to all its stakeholders,” said company secretary Charmaine Daniels in an update for the third quarter to November 30, 2023.

“Through leveraging on digital and financial technologies, we firmly believe we have a big role to play in unlocking opportunities, providing needed digital solutions and thereby improving our financial performance,” she said.

Daniels added the group would continue refining its products for the various digital platforms and these, she said, are expected to increase their revenue contribution to the group.

“Our digital platforms business, Vaya Technologies continued to focus on and drive the anchor businesses in Healthtech and On Demand Services. We continue to develop and refine our products in these sectors which we believe have yet to fully realize their potential.

“As we progress into the next quarter and year, we believe we will be able to increase contribution from these nascent businesses to the broader EcoCash Holdings Group performance,” she said.

Market watchers also guide the group to benefit from the technology adoption drive especially in the financial services sector and upgrade the counter to a buy recommendation.

“We maintain our long term buy recommendation,” said research firm Morgan & Co.

“Going forward, we foresee a sustained demand for the group’s services given the rapid technology adoption in Zimbabwe households and an increase in paperless transactions,” said the research firm.

Already, the group’s earnings have been largely driven by its mobile money platform EcoCash and Steward Bank.

Further growth is anticipated from the mobile money, which has now tapped into the foreign currency domestic remittances through the EcoCash FCA wallet.

With the Government reducing the IMTT on domestic money transfer transactions to 2 percent from 4 percent effective beginning of this year, EcoCash said it is expected to accelerate the adoption of US dollar digital money transfer services.

Already, the mobile money platform has recorded a decline in domestic money transactions as the economy is now largely skewed to US dollar based transactions.

“As the market has increased usage of the United States Dollar, we have seen a drop in the volume of our local currency mobile money transactions in the period compared to prior year,” said Daniels.-ebusinessweekly