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The recent Zimswitch Digital Connect Symposium highlighted the importance of collaboration in Zimbabwe’s digital payments ecosystem. Industry stakeholders emphasized that banks, fintechs, regulators, and telcos must work together to drive growth and innovation.
Currently, each institution maintains its own Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) processes, resulting in duplication, friction, and higher costs. This creates a cumbersome experience for customers, who must repeatedly submit documents and undergo verification processes.
A proposed centralized digital identity framework could alleviate these issues. This framework would allow customers to undergo a single verification process, recognized instantly by all connected financial institutions. Biometric authentication and AI-powered KYC tools would make onboarding faster, safer, and more inclusive.
Collaboration would reduce costs, improve efficiency, and deliver a better customer experience. Global examples, such as Nigeria’s NIBSS and India’s Aadhaar-linked eKYC, demonstrate the potential for significant improvements in financial inclusion and reduced fraud.
Zimswitch’s innovation pipeline includes AI-powered fraud detection, tokenization, QR payments, open banking APIs, and domestic remittances. These tools are available, but adoption remains slow without industry-wide collaboration.
To unlock a bolder digital economy, Zimbabwe’s ecosystem must adapt to changing customer behavior, innovate continuously, break down silos, and push for regulatory alignment. The future of Zimbabwe’s digital economy depends on the industry’s ability to move from talking about collaboration to building shared systems.
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