One of Zimbabwe’s multinational banks, Standard Chartered has just sent an email to customers announcing they will be increasing fees for various services again.

Every day we wake up to price hikes for literally everything that we buy as inflation continues to take its toll. Banks also want their pound of flesh, banks have to make money too. Since they cannot exactly make money the traditional way, banks in Zimbabwe have for the past 10 years or so resorted to levying various charges on account holders.

The New charges

Transaction Description	Old Fees	New Fees
Maintenance Fee FCAs	ZWL 25/month	ZWL 45/month
Service Fee Per Transaction	ZWL 0.99	ZWL 1.99
Error handling fee	ZWL 10	ZWL 50
Visa Gold Card (initial issue and replacement)	ZWL 25	ZWL 75
Local POS Fee (Zimswitch)	0.5% min ZWL 0.50	0.5% ZWL 0.99
Local POS Balance Enquiry (Zimswitch)	ZWL 0.08	ZWL 0.80

NB All charges pertain to Personal banking.

New Mobile Banking Charges

Mobile Banking Pricing	Current Charge in ZWL	New Charge in ZWL
Balance Enquiry	0.08	0.80
Mini Statement	0.24	1.00
Statement Request	0.10	1.00
Cheque Book Request	0.10	1.00
Bill Payment	3.00	5.00
Funds Transfer	3.00	5.00
ZIPIT Send	4.00	5.00
ZIPIT Recall by customer e.g. if you send to wrong person	2.00	20.00

Some fees were increased by 1000%!

Some of the banking fees have been increased by a shocking 1000%. Given the fact that most workers haven’t seen a significant pay hike in a while, this is going to erode people’s spending power further.

To be fair SanChart is not alone, Ecocash also had to review their charges two weeks ago. To be fair though the Ecocash price review was mostly a result of the Finance Minister’s 2% tax more than anything. Other banks have also quietly hiked their service charges without even bothering to tell their customers.

This comes during a month-end where we expect prices to go up especially given the recent depreciation of the Zimdollar against other currencies. The government and civil servants are locked in pay negotiations so there may well be the possibility that civil servants will receive a pay hike which might cushion them from this service charge hike but most other workers will be left exposed.