EcoCash & Steward Bank offering customers ZWL$1000 loans in KaShagi part 2

EcoCash and Steward Bank are offering their customers ZWL$1 000 loans with a reboot of the “KaShagi Ipapo Ipapo” promotion:

The KaShagi promotion which was last held in 2018 is coming at a very different time for one of the two Cassava companies offering the loans. But before we get into the speculation, here’s how you get a loan:

EcoCash

• Dial *151#
• Select EcoCash Save
• Select EcoCash Kashagi
• Choose Request Loan
• Enter amount
• Select Tenure & Confirm
• You’ll get an SMS confirmation

You can access the same facility on Steward Bank using the bank’s *210# USSD.

Terms and conditions

So with every loan, there are T&Cs and the one that many of you will be curious about is the interest rate. EcoCash and Steward Bank are charging 15% on the loan and you have a month to pay it back (30-day tenure).

In the event that you can’t pay back the loan, EcoCash will begin deducting from the amount that comes into your wallet until the loan is paid back. Likewise for the Steward Bank side of the transaction, however, if you default your loan with Steward, the loan will be taken from your EcoCash wallet.

Another safety measure to the ZWL$1000 loans comes courtesy of the RBZ’s directive which said you can only have one mobile money wallet. This means that if you choose to throw away the line after using the loan, EcoCash will find you if you try to apply for another EcoCash wallet.

The timing suggests this is more about EcoCash than anything else

Since the national switch took effect, EcoCash has been trying many different ways of getting transaction volumes up. The mobile network operator has been pushing it’s EcoCash Rewards program heavily and it seems to have worked for the most part.

EcoCash held 97.75% of market share for the value of transactions (and 98.26% for share mobile money transactions) in Q3 2020. Which puts them at the same sort of level they were in Q1 of 2020, 98.31% and 95.92% respectively.

The first quarter of 2020 was before the national switch directive as well as the ZWL$5 000 a day limit that then became the ZWL$35 000 a week mobile money limit. EcoCash also bounced back from a Q2 dip in both market share of mobile money transactions and value of transactions in Q3. This all means the Rewards program (faults and all) worked in getting them back on track despite the restrictions.

Relaunching KaShagi looks like yet another way that the folks at Cassava are trying to keep EcoCash on top.

Credit is king…

Due to the lockdown, people are looking for alternative revenue streams. Sometimes you need a little bit of money to get something else going and what EcoCash and Steward are offering could get more people to turn back to their EcoCash wallets.

A thousand might not seem like much to some but to others it’s could help fill in the gaps that emerged because of the pandemic induced lockdown.