- RBZ scraped balance enquiry fees and cash deposit fees, withdrawals capped at 2%, POS at 1.5%, directly hitting the fee/commission income that made up 67-80% of revenue for all 6 listed banks.
- Sector average loans-to-deposit ratio is ∼44%, with CBZ at 36.7% and TN CyberTech at 18.6%, while non-interest income dwarfs net interest income across the board
- With 76.1% of businesses informal and ∼$42bn of GDP outside formal banking, incumbents must pivot to mobile-based, data-driven nano-loans to lend into short-cycle, high-velocity demand currently served by 40%-in-2-weeks loan apps
Harare- In February 2026, the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ) removed balance enquiry fees and capped transaction charges across the banking system, directing all banks and deposit-taking microfinance institutions to implement the new fee structure by 31 March 2026.
This was announced by RBZ Governor John Mushayavanhu in the 2026 Monetary Policy Statement delivered on 27 February, in which he ordered the removal of account balance inquiry charges on all banking and mobile banking platforms, scrapped cash deposit fees entirely, capped cash withdrawal charges at 2% of the withdrawn amount, and limited point-of-sale charges to 1.5% of the transaction value.
The intent, Mushayavanhu said, was to reduce banking costs that had for years driven customers away from formal financial services.
The policy is correct as a financial inclusion measure, but as a revenue story for Zimbabwe's banks, it is a direct hit to the income line they have leaned on most heavily. Fee and commission income has been the structural anchor of bank profitability through Zimbabwe's successive currency transitions, precisely because it does not require lending. It generates revenue from transaction volumes flowing through an account regardless of whether the bank has taken any credit risk.
Removing balance enquiry fees and capping withdrawal and POS charges compresses that anchor. Banks that have been earning without lending must now earn by lending. That is what the MPS, intentionally or not, has set in motion.
The Numbers That Make the Problem Visible
The 2025 full-year results of Zimbabwe's six listed banking groups lay bare the structural dependence on fee income that the MPS is now targeting. Across the sector, non-interest income, comprising fees, commissions, transaction charges, and digital platform revenues accounted for between 67% and 80% of total income at every institution. At CBZ Holdings, Zimbabwe's largest bank, non-interest income of USD 143 million dwarfed net interest income of USD 70 million. At TN CyberTech Bank, the ratio was even more extreme, with non-interest income of USD 25 million running at nearly four times the USD 6.5 million in net interest income. ZB Financial Holdings generated USD 99.5 million in non-interest income against USD 44.5 million in net interest income. The pattern is universal. Not one of the six listed groups derives a majority of its income from the core banking function of taking deposits and lending them out at a margin.
The loans-to-deposit ratios tell the same story from the balance sheet side. CBZ, which holds USD 1.03 billion in deposits, deploys only 36.7% of that base as loans. TN CyberTech, with USD 168.9 million in deposits, has deployed a remarkable 18.6% as loans, less than one dollar in five of its deposit base is working as credit in the economy. NMB and First Capital sit in the 44-50% range. Only FBC Holdings, at 85.1%, approaches what might reasonably be called active financial intermediation.
The sector average is approximately 44 cents lent for every deposit dollar held. The remainder sits in government securities, treasury bills, and liquid assets that generate yield without credit risk and without contributing to private sector growth.
This was a defensible posture when fee income was abundant. A bank earning USD 143 million in fee and commission revenue, as CBZ did in 2025, can sustain a conservative loan book and still generate competitive returns. The 2026 MPS ends that logic. The fee income line, CBZ's ZWG 2.72 billion in commission and fee income, TN's withdrawal income that grew 332% through ATM expansion, ZB's transaction-driven non-interest revenues, is the precise category of income the new charge framework targets. With those revenues structurally compressed, net interest income must grow to compensate. And net interest income grows only one way: by lending more.
A USD 53 Billion Economy, Most of Which Banks Have Never Touched
The problem is the economy they are being pushed to lend into. ZimStat's 2023 Economic Census, conducted between June 2024 and March 2025, found that 76.1% of all business establishments in Zimbabwe are informal. The Zimbabwe National Chamber of Commerce estimates the informal sector at approximately USD 42 billion, or 64.1% of GDP. Independent analysts and the International Labour Organisation carry the employment share of the informal economy above 80%. Against a GDP rebased to USD 52.4 billion for 2025, the arithmetic is unambiguous, the dominant share of Zimbabwe's economic activity happens outside the reach of any conventional banking product. The formal economy that banks currently serve, the payslip earners, the registered companies with audited accounts, the salaried civil servants, is at most a third of the economic whole, and by independent estimates considerably less.
This is not a new observation. What the 2026 MPS has done is change the urgency of acting on it. When fee income was abundant, a bank could maintain a conservative loan book calibrated entirely to the formal sector and still generate acceptable returns. That cushion is now thinner. If banks are to rebuild the income that fee compression will cost them, lending is the mechanism and the only lending market large enough to matter is the one they have not yet entered.
The overcapitalisation data reinforces the point. Every bank in the sector carries capital adequacy ratios between 25% and 34% against a 12% regulatory minimum. CBZ's capital adequacy stands at 26.05%, FBC at similar levels, TN CyberTech at 34%, the highest in the sector. This overcapitalisation is not prudence for its own sake. It reflects an inability to deploy capital into credit assets at a rate that would bring capital ratios toward more commercially efficient levels. The sector collectively holds capital that is generating regulatory comfort rather than productive financial intermediation.
Who Is Already in That Market and What They Are Charging
The informal credit market is not waiting for formal banks to arrive. It is being served, expensively and extractively, by operators who identified the demand and moved into it in the absence of institutional competition. Loan applications including HiMoney and ZimLoan are operating in precisely the segment that commercial banks have left untouched, and the rates they charge reflect the economics of a market with no alternatives for the borrower. A customer who borrows USD 35 through one of these platforms repays USD 48 within 15 days, but needs to put 50 dollars in Ecocash in order to pay, a cost of borrowing of approximately 40% over two weeks.
These apps are not marginal operations. They are surviving and growing because the borrowers they serve are paying 40% in two weeks not from ignorance but from necessity. The market trader who needs USD 35 to restock on a Monday morning does not have the luxury of waiting for a bank to process a loan application requiring a payslip he does not have, a bank statement that does not reflect his actual cash flow, and a branch visit during hours when he is working. He pays 40% because that is what the market charges when no credible alternative exists.
The loan apps are the symptom of a gap that formal banking has left open long enough for informal operators to build businesses inside it.
Kashagi and the Model That Already Works
Econet's Kashagi product, is the most instructive example of what informal-economy-oriented lending can look like when built correctly. Kashagi requires no payslip, no bank statement, no branch visit, and no physical collateral. It uses EcoCash wallet transaction history, the volume, frequency, and consistency of a customer's mobile money activity as the credit signal. It disburses instantly into the wallet the borrower already uses daily.
EcoCash reintroduced Kashagi in USD, making the process instant and hassle-free, and the product has maintained commercially viable non-performing loan ratios because the repayment mechanism is built into the same infrastructure through which the borrower conducts every other financial transaction.
TN CyberTech Bank reported over 612,000 nano-loan disbursements during its ten-month reporting period to December 2025, a volume that no conventional bank branch network could have processed. Yet TN's loans-to-deposit ratio is only 18.6%. The nano-loan capability exists; the scale of deployment does not yet match the infrastructure's potential. This is the strategic gap that the fee income compression should accelerate closing. TN's cash withdrawal income grew 332% in the period through ATM expansion , that income is now directly in the crosshairs of the 2026 MPS charge framework. Converting that payment infrastructure into a credit origination engine is not optional, but the survival path.
How the Informal Sector Can Revolutionise Zimbabwean Banking
The conventional framing of the informal economy is that it is a problem to be solved , a collection of unregistered, untaxed, undocumented activity that exists outside the banking system and that banks must wait for regulators to formalise before engaging with it. That framing is wrong, and it is the framing that has cost the sector a decade of growth. The informal economy is not a problem for Zimbabwean banking. It is the solution to Zimbabwean banking's most pressing structural challenge, which is finding enough creditworthy borrowers to absorb the USD deposits sitting idle on balance sheets and replace the fee income that the 2026 MPS has now compressed.
Consider what the informal sector actually represents in economic terms. ZimStat's census identified 204,798 operational business establishments, of which 76.1% are informal. The wholesale and retail trade sector alone constitutes 73% of all establishments. These are not subsistence operators.
They are active commercial enterprises restocking, turning inventory, receiving customers, disbursing wages, paying suppliers whose daily cash flow cycles are, in many cases, more predictable and more consistent than those of formal sector SMEs carrying overdraft facilities on the basis of audited accounts that are already six months old by the time the credit department reads them. The informal economy generates real, recurring, measurable economic activity. It is invisible to banks only because banks have not built the instruments to see it.
The revolution the informal sector can deliver to Zimbabwean banking operates across four distinct dimensions. The first is deposit mobilisation at a scale that the formal sector alone cannot achieve. Zimbabwe's banking sector holds approximately 82% of broad money in foreign currency deposits, the majority concentrated in a relatively narrow base of formally employed and corporate depositors.
The informal economy's USD cash, which circulates through flea markets, roadside stalls, kombi ranks, and cross-border traders, is almost entirely outside the banking system. It sits in pockets, in safes, under mattresses , to use the RBZ Governor's own phrase. A banking product designed for the informal depositor , low minimum balance, zero fees on small accounts, mobile-first access, no punitive charges on infrequent transactions , would not merely improve financial inclusion metrics. It would expand the deposit base available for lending, reducing the sector's cost of funds and widening the margin on credit.
The second dimension is loan book growth at velocity that branch-based lending cannot replicate. The informal economy's credit demand is short-cycle and high-frequency: a market trader needs USD 50 for three days, a street vendor needs USD 100 for two weeks, a small manufacturer needs USD 500 for 30 days to bridge an order delivery. These are not large loans individually. In aggregate, across 150,000 active informal businesses in Harare alone, they represent hundreds of millions of dollars in annual credit demand cycling at monthly or faster frequencies.
A bank that captures even 10% of that demand with an automated mobile lending product, disbursing and repaying through EcoCash or OneMoney, without human underwriting intervention is originating a loan book whose interest income compounds continuously through rapid turnover. At 5% monthly on a 30-day working capital product, the annualised yield on that book exceeds anything the treasury bill portfolio currently generates.
The third dimension is data. Every informal economy transaction that passes through a mobile money platform generates a data point. Airtime purchases, utility payments, EcoCash send-and-receive flows, merchant payments at POS terminals, remittance receipts , collectively these build a behavioural financial profile for millions of Zimbabweans who have never owned a bank account and will never produce a payslip.
A bank that partners with EcoCash, NetOne, or the telecoms operators to access anonymised transaction data under appropriate regulatory consent frameworks can build credit scoring models that are more current and more accurate than anything derived from a payslip or a six-month bank statement. The informal economy is not data-poor. It is data-rich in a format that conventional banking has not yet learned to read.
The fourth dimension is velocity of capital recycling. The formal sector's credit cycle is slow, a corporate loan closes in weeks, disburses in tranches, and repays over years. The informal economy's credit cycle is fast: borrow Monday, restock Tuesday, sell Wednesday through Sunday, repay the following Monday.
A bank serving the informal market at scale is not sitting on NPLs for eighteen months watching a corporate borrower restructure. It is cycling capital through the economy at frequencies that generate superior risk-adjusted returns precisely because small, short-duration loans to a diversified base of active traders are far less correlated in their default behaviour than large, long-duration loans concentrated in a few sectors. The informal market's credit risk is granular, diverse, and manageable with the right underwriting tools.
It is the opposite of the concentrated credit risk that generated CBZ's ZWG 800 million ECL charge in 2024 and its equally dramatic reversal in 2025.
The Gap Bankers Now Need to Fill
The formal sector that Zimbabwe's banks have historically served will continue to be served. The question the 2026 MPS raises is whether the compression of fee income creates enough financial pressure to force the institutional innovation that should have happened already, the redesign of credit products, underwriting models, and distribution channels to reach the majority of the economy that has no access to institutional credit at any price that reflects its actual risk.
FBC's 85.1% loans-to-deposit ratio demonstrates that aggressive intermediation is commercially viable within the current operating environment. Its net interest income of USD 54.4 million and non-performing loan ratio of 4.9%, the cleanest in the sector among institutions with meaningful credit exposure shows that lending into Zimbabwe's economy at scale does not necessarily mean lending badly. What it requires is the analytical capability and sectoral expertise that FBC has built and that most of its peers have not yet invested in at comparable depth.
The informal market does not lack creditworthiness, but documentation. A market trader who has operated the same stall for seven years, restocked every three days, and maintained a consistent EcoCash transaction history has demonstrated repayment capacity more reliably than many formally employed borrowers who carry a payslip but spend beyond their income. The difference is not risk , it is the data format in which that risk is assessed.
Banks that invest in behavioural credit models built on mobile money transaction data, mobile-first loan disbursement, and auto-deduction repayment infrastructure are not lowering their standards. They are upgrading their measurement tools to match the economy they actually operate in.
The loan apps charging 40% in two weeks are not the competition banks should fear. They are the benchmark that proves demand exists at almost any price. The bank that arrives in that market with a product priced at a fraction of what the informal borrower currently pays will not need a marketing campaign. Zimbabwe's USD 53 billion economy is not waiting for banks to show up. It has been borrowing from whoever would lend, at whatever price was asked.
The institution that recognises the informal economy not as a risk to be managed but as a market to be won will do more than replace its lost fee income. It will build the deposit base, the loan book, the data advantage, and the customer relationships that compound into a structural competitive lead no competitor can easily replicate. That is the revolution on offer. The only question is which bank moves first.
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