Yesterday Standard Chartered Bank sent out an announcement to its customers informing them that they had suspended EcoCash again. This means that at the moment it is not possible to make Wallet To Bank between StanChart accounts and EcoCash.

Dear Client, we are temporarily suspending Ecocash wallet to bank as our parnters work to resolve challenges with the service. We apologise for the inconvinience.

The SMS from StanChart

This is not the first time StanChart has done this actually. They have done this on a lot of occasions and at one point the suspension lasted for months before it was resolved. The last time this happened was on 22 November before the service was restored 25 November.

It’s actually the smart thing to do. It has been almost a month since the EcoCash upgrade happened and yet problems persist although they are now less universal than before. Banks are inundated with support requests whenever these errors happen and StanChart’s model is all about reducing the need for human support.

Right now a lot of shops are not accepting EcoCash resulting in a lot of people attempting to make Wallet to Bank transfers so they can use their ZIMSWITCH cards instead. This has been accompanied by a lot of errors as sometimes money is deducted from your account and never reaches your bank account.

Every day we go out shopping or to do our surveys we meet people who have been a victim of this error. Some have been lucky to have the transaction reversed. Some have not been so lucky.