ZPesa

Zantel HQ in Dar es Salaam

Today we enrolled and tried a third type of mobile banking offered here in Tanzania by MNOs. It’s called ZPesa and is offered by the MNO Zantel. An interesting note was that while Vodacom is careful with labeling their service with mobile banking after the audit by Kenya’s financial department, Zantel is actively promoting this aspect. A quote from the brochure: “Your ZPesa account will provide you banking services at the press of a button, even it you don’t have a formal bank account!”. Just like Zap it is not promoted as a remittance service at all, instead it is the technical innovation and efficiency that is emphasized. This is probably due to that The Bank of Tanzania has approved the service in some way, will try to find out more about that collaboration.

The enrollment was fast and smooth and there were quite a lot of information on how to use the service. No identification was required oddly enough and after a quick word with some clients in the office it still seems that ZPesa shares similar user patterns with M-Pesa, remittances to family and friends.

There are some technical differences regarding the three services. M-Pesa uses USSD technology which is initiated by dialing *150#. With USSD you communicate with the operator through a menu system. Zap also uses USSD, but it is executed from a pre-installed program on the SIM-card as we mentioned earlier. ZPesa, on the other hand, is purely SMS-based. With only very little time spent trying out these different types of services I must say I’m impressed by the simplicity of the M-Pesa system menu. Though to rate the systems as a hole is not possible without using the services for a longer time period, testing the agent networks and pricing.

6 Comments

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gunnar, March 29, 2009:

I’ve got one update here. With ZPesa you can choose to use USSD (*109#) or a text (SMS) message. However, the brochure chose not to mention the USSD alternative at all.
al, April 8, 2009:

I think your comment about M-Pesa technology is wrong. From what I understand it’s on a SIM-TK and is USSD based. You can’t get it without a SIM swap!

However the application differs from normal USSD where it gathers all of the data for the operation chosen and then sends it down to the server. (As opposed to ferrying answer/questions back and forth.
gunnar, April 9, 2009:

Hey Al!

I think it is a different technological setup in Kenya and Tanzania. Here it is just a plain USSD connection initiated with *103#. I haven’t tried the application in Kenya but it is probably the way you describe it.

Thanks for reading!
ngetha, May 5, 2009:

The Kenyan one Zap / MPesa both use the STK application, so the menu appears as part of the MTO menu
ngetha, May 5, 2009:

Question about ZPesa, I saw they have a site online at zpesa.com, is it possible to do transactions online as well?
gunnar, May 20, 2009:

I think they’re aiming for that but the site is terribly broken right now. At least for individual users. I know the agents have a separate interface to manage their things but I haven’t tried it, hopefully that one works at least.

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