The RBZ Wants India's UPI Behind Your Payments. Here's What It Could Change, and What It Can't

If you have ever sent money from a bank account to an EcoCash wallet, paid a tuckshop by merchant code, or waited for a ZIPIT to land, you have used a payments system that works but costs more and joins up less neatly than it should. The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe now says it wants to rebuild that plumbing on technology borrowed from India.

On 5 October Governor John Mushayavanhu said the central bank is in talks with NPCI International Payments, the overseas arm of the organisation that runs India's Unified Payments Interface, known as UPI. He said negotiations could conclude by 31 October.^[1][2]

Here is what has been said, what has not, and what it could mean for the fees you pay.

What the governor actually said

Mushayavanhu described a system that would give banks, mobile money operators, fintech companies and other payment providers one shared piece of infrastructure, with transactions settling in real time.

He gave four reasons for wanting it. He expects it to cut transaction costs and speed up payments. He said direct account-to-account transfers could become a cheaper alternative to cards for small everyday purchases. He said banks could offer merchants payment services at lower cost. And he said more digital payments would give the authorities better data on what small and medium-sized businesses contribute to the economy.^[1][2]

Cross-border payments and remittances were mentioned as something that could follow later. They are not part of the first phase he described.^[2]

What we don't know yet

Quite a lot. The 31 October date is a target for finishing talks, not a launch date, and nobody has disclosed a budget, a timetable or a fee schedule.^[3]

Nor has anyone said how the new system would sit alongside what already exists. Would it replace ZIPIT, which is run by Zimswitch, or plug into it? Who would operate it, the central bank or the industry? Those answers will decide whether this lowers costs or simply adds another layer.

One claim doing the rounds needs correcting: that a deal would make Zimbabwe the first country in sub-Saharan Africa to adopt UPI.^[4] It would not. Namibia got there first.^[5]

We already have instant payments, so what is new?

This is the part most coverage from outside the country has missed. ZIPIT launched in 2011, making it the second instant payment system on the continent. It connects 17 commercial banks, five deposit-taking microfinance institutions and six mobile money operators, and it handles both US dollars and local currency.^[6]

What ZIPIT does not have is much of what makes UPI popular in India. ZIPIT runs on an older messaging standard built for card transactions, that QR code payments exist but have seen limited use, and that there is no cross-border capability at all.^[6]

UPI was designed around the phone from the start. You pay a person or a shop using a phone number, a short payment address or a QR code, from whichever banking app you like, and the money moves between accounts in seconds. The Reserve Bank has been moving in that direction already. A circular on 2 March told banks and payment providers to bring their apps and merchant services in line with a single national QR code standard, so that one code works across every provider.^[3]

There is some history here too. When the central bank named Zimswitch the national payments switch in 2020, tech writer Tinashe Nyahasha argued that it was the wrong fix for EcoCash's dominance, because Zimswitch is a privately owned, for-profit business. The better model, he wrote then, was India's, where the payments corporation is a non-profit set up with the central bank's backing and owned broadly by the industry.^[7] The Reserve Bank took a 15 percent stake in Zimswitch that same year.^[6] Six years on, it is at least reaching for India's technology. Whether it also copies India's ownership model is one of the open questions.

What happened in Namibia

Namibia is the closest thing to a preview. NPCI International signed with the Bank of Namibia in May 2024. The system, now branded WayaMe, went live in June 2026, and Bank Windhoek processed the first real payments, government grants to beneficiaries, on 17 June.^[8][9]

Two lessons stand out. The first is time. It took roughly two years to go from signature to first live payment. The second is scope. By August, WayaMe still only handled payments from government to individuals.^[5] The things ordinary users are waiting for, sending money to a friend, paying a shop, scanning a QR code, are scheduled for later phases.

Namibia also made a choice about ownership that is worth watching for here. The platform is run by a subsidiary of the central bank and is treated as a public good, like a road, with the stated plan of handing it to the industry once access is wider and fees are lower.^[9]

What it could mean for you

If you send money often. A shared switch can reduce what providers charge each other, and competition between apps on the same rails tends to push fees down. But a large part of what you pay is tax, and a new system does not touch that. Under EcoCash's US dollar charges, a registered customer pays 3.3 percent to send between US$5 and US$500, of which 1.3 percent is EcoCash's fee and 2 percent is the government's transfer tax.^[10][11] Even if the provider's share fell to nothing, the 2 percent would remain unless Treasury changes it.

If you run a small business. This is where the governor's pitch is strongest. Card machines are expensive and many small traders don't have one. A QR code printed on paper that accepts payment from any bank or wallet costs almost nothing to set up. The trade-off is visibility. The governor said plainly that better data on small businesses is one of the goals, and for traders operating informally that will be a consideration.

If you receive money from abroad. Don't expect anything soon. Remittances are a later ambition, not part of the first phase.

If you are wondering when. Going by Namibia, a signature this month would point to first live transactions around late 2028, and to the features most people care about some time after that. It could move faster here because banks and mobile wallets are already connected to each other, but nobody has promised that.

The idea is sound and the timing makes sense, with a single QR standard already on the way. What will decide whether it is worth the wait is the detail that hasn't been published: who owns it, what it costs to use, and whether the tax on every transfer comes down with it.