This week, we attended a ZB launch event where two products were introduced. The first was the digital wallet that we wrote about earlier in the week.
The other was a payment gateway called Smile & Pay—yes, the word “smile” features a lot with ZB 🙂. It’s basically a way for businesses to receive payments from customers on the internet—for free (more on that “free” part later).
Smile and Pay does the same job that other local payment gateways do – helping you accept EcoCash, ZimSwitch, Innbucks, OMari, OneMoney, Visa, Mastercard etc… on your website, chatbot, mobile app and so on
How you can start using Smile and Pay
To use the payment gateway, sign up here: zbnet.zb.co.zw/merchant_gateway
To complete up to the point of accepting payments as a business, have your company documents, tax clearance, proof of residence, and other requirements ready.
Individuals can also use the platform to create payment requests—think PayPal-style links.
With ZB having such a wide agent network, we were a bit surprised the gateway doesn’t support cash payments yet. But the team said this is just the beginning, and more payment options will be added over time.
Competitors in the Market
The market has a few payment gateways already, helping online businesses accept EcoCash, Innbucks and so forth. The most successful of them is Paynow, which was launched back in 2014.
As with the digital wallet, the key selling point the ZB team emphasized at the launch was the “free to use” aspect. We already mentioned in our digital wallet article that ZB plans to sustain the free transactions for about a year. Beyond that, we expect them to align with the market—likely matching the pricing of other providers.
Check these Paynow fees for example:
There’s need for some clarity on what “free” means. ZB is scrapping the fees they would normally charge. But there are still other fees they can’t control—such as those from EcoCash, Innbucks, OMari, Visa, and of course, government taxes. As a merchant, these are still costs that either you or your customers will have to absorb.
Not much data is available on online payments in Zimbabwe. There are however a number of gateways. Besides Paynow there is Steward Pay, Pese Pay, ContiPay, eSolutions, DPO Pay , and maybe a few others we haven’t come across. If you know of more, please drop them in the comments!
Out of these, we at Techzim have used Paynow. Like other tech businesses locally, we’ve also integrated directly with the wallets EcoCash, OneMoney, Innbucks where we could for our airtime products – the thin margins meant gateways were out of the question.
We’re curious to hear from you: which payment gateway have you used most, and does ZB’s Smile & Pay offering interest you?
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