Techzim can exclusively reveal that NetOne is working on rebranding its mobile service from OneWallet to OneMoney. The rebranding will be part of a relaunch of the product after the company migrated it to a new Huawei powered platform.
The plan to relaunch OneWallet was revealed in January this year.
According to sources Techzim spoke to, the new OneMoney is set to be unveiled in a few weeks. It’s not clear yet what changes, besides the name, are planned.
What’s clear though is that the product will need to solve specific problems with payments and money transfer that Zimbabweans are facing today with the ongoing cash crisis.
NetOne’s mobile money product has to date performed very poorly. In this year’s first quarter, the company only had 10k active subscribers, compared to 52k Telecash subscribers, and an impressive 3.2 million subscribers on Econet’s EcoCash. Basically, NetOne has 0.3% of the marketshare.
This is not NetOne’s first attempt at revitalising its mobile money offering. After the initial launch in 2011, OneWallet was relaunched in November 2013.
One area NetOne will need to drastically improve is the size and visibility of its agent and merchant network.Today NetOne only has about 245 agents country wide. Compare that to Econet’s 30,000 agents. NetOne will therefore need to invest significantly and do so for a long time before subscribers can trust that they can store and easily use money in their OneMoney wallet.
On strategies the company may employ, the sources Techzim spoke to suggested NetOne plans to have government use it as a default mobile wallet for civil servant salaries. There’s apparently also a plan to make it default payment method for certain government services. Any such plans will ofcourse only succeed if the product itself works well in other areas (expansive agent and merchant network, high agent liquidity), otherwise OneMoney will become more an annoyance than a convenience.
One response
That’s very good