Rapid Innbucks Expansion As It Partners TM Pick n Pay… Eating at EcoCash Gradually

2024 has turned out to be a year of aggressive expansion and experimentation for the Innbucks digital wallet and money transfer platform.

The Simbisa brands owned fintech company announced today that it’s now available throughout the TM Pick n Pay chain. That’s a whopping 59 additional sites going up at once.

The company announced the news on social media, stating:

Your shopping just got better! You can now cash in, cash out at all 59 TM Pick n Pay branches across Zimbabwe. Whether you’re topping up your InnBucks wallet or withdrawing cash, it’s fast, secure, and hassle-free. Simply stop by the TM Pick n Pay Customer Service desk

It’s a big deal for customers. In places that didn’t have a Simbisa outlet, using Innbucks meant travelling several km out. Take Ruwa for example – despite being a densely populated area, it doesn’t have a Simbisa outlet, which meant residents of the area had to travel some 10km to Msasa for Innbucks. But Ruwa has a Pick n Pay branch.

Simbisa has some 300+ fast food outlets in Zimbabwe where Innbucks is operational. 59 locations going up at once is significant for the business.

Innbucks joins other financial services companies at the TM Pick n Pay Customer Service desk – there’s already BancABC and of course the big one, EcoCash.

The battle for mobile money dominance

EcoCash remains dominant in the digital wallet and local money transfer market, but Innbucks is eating away at that dominance bit by bit. They are doing so with the aggressive expansion but also by doing things that delight customers.

Take the $1 monthly fee for example. Exorbitant transactions fees have been a frustration for Zimbabweans. We generally view financial services companies as unreasonably expensive because of the fees. So the Innbucks move to a $1 subscription model was welcomed by many Zimbabweans and you will often hear someone say “You can send/pay through Innbucks or EcoCash, but if there’s a Innbucks near you, I prefer that”.

Zimbabweans are training each other to believe Innbucks is cheaper. It doesn’t matter if that’s just a perception or not.

EcoCash is about 8.35 million subscribers strong. Some estimates suggest Innbucks has around 3 million subscribers now, which is quite significant when you consider the company has been operating for just over two years. In that same period EcoCash added 600k subscribers.

If Innbucks keeps at it, every EcoCash subscriber might also be an Innbucks subscriber in just 4 years. Less if this Innbucks growth has a compounding effect of feeding even more growth. That’s assuming EcoCash has saturated the market of Zimbabweans that have need for a mobile money wallet.

And when Zimbabweans have both EcoCash and Innbucks on their phones, whoever is charging less per transaction, and has more outlets, will take the lion’s share of the transactions.

No doubt right now EcoCash is winning. Beyond just the wallet and money transfer, it has insurance (short term and life cover) and loans. Innbucks has loans too – it has been aggressively pushing them actually – and it’s trying to catch up to making its wallet useful in paying Merchants. Beyond that, there will be some things that only a mobile network backed fintech company can do, and EcoCash is trying to leverage that advantage right now.