Big IT companies in Zimbabwe seem to hold very high hopes for the future of e-commerce in the country. Back in 2014, Webdev introduced Paynow, the first online payments gateway to allow merchants to accept several of the country’s most popular payment methods in addition to VISA and Mastercard ones. Granted there had been some efforts towards this end before Paynow but most of those were the side projects of lone developers which latter got abandoned.

Paynow as a platform leaves very little for one to improve upon, or at least that is what many of us thought until a mysterious payments gateway started showing up on some local websites. Contipay is a Zimbabwean online payments gateway that was introduced by local IT company Contitouch in 2019 and it appears to have been pretty much flying under the radar ever since. Now, at the moment I can’t tell if Contipay is meant to be an improvement over Paynow in any way (very unlikely though from what I’ve seen so far) or is just meant to be a competing alternative (there is also absolutely nothing wrong with that).

Who is it for?

While the Contipay platform is mainly intended to facilitate online payments, the company also claims that its capability to accept several payment methods can also be harnessed in a physical store.

Accepted payment methods

Contipay allows merchants to accept payments via methods such as Visa, Mastercard, Ecocash, One Money and Telecash. Also listed on the platform’s website are less usual modes of payment like ZIPIT, RTGS, RTGS FCA, Ecocash FCA and a befuddling “direct deposits” option. ZIPIT and Ecocash FCA on their own are fairly unusual as payment methods; the former is a moderately popular Zimswitch mobile banking service which is mostly used for sending money between bank accounts while the latter refers to foreign currency kept in an Ecocash mobile wallet.

The listing of RTGS and RTGS FCA as payment methods is likely to cause a little bit of confusion in the country since when the Zim dollar made its largely unwelcome return in 2019, RTGS became one of its many confusing and (unfortunately) official monikers. The problem is that the acronym also originally refers to the primary system used to transfer funds between local banks: the Real Time Gross Settlement system. While some banks allow their account holders to initiate RTGS transfers via their mobile and internet banking platforms, the transactions are in no way instantaneous.  This is problematic when transacting online.

All-in-all the platform appears to have gone the extra mile to allow electronic foreign currency payments to be made.

Lack of promotion

Compared to the amount of fanfare which accompanied Paynow’s introduction, Contipay’s entry into the market has largely been subdued and many people are likely to only discover it when they want to make a payment on some of the websites which use it. There are probably two major reasons why Contipay is content to stay in the shadows: the first is the general state of the economy—Paynow came out at the peak of the multicurrency economy and rather than just trying to survive, businesses then were actively looking for opportunities and e-commerce looked very promising. The second reason is that Contipay appears to be only pursuing big companies like Alpha Media Holdings and Schweppes Zimbabwe, both of which use the platform to accept online payments (AMH also offers Paynow as an alternative). Every time I clicked the “Register/login” button on the Contipay site I was taken to a blank page which may mean that Contipay likes to keep its relationship with its clients more personal (you probably have to email them to get signed up).

Comparison to Paynow

From where I stand, Contipay’s platform is a far cry from the welcoming and easy to use nature of Paynow. The latter’s website offers very clear instructions and guides for both merchants and their customers while the little content that is on the Contipay site reads like a dispassionate company profile. Paynow also allows anyone with a Zimbabwean bank account to sign themselves up to receive payments while Contipay appears to prefer that you first contact them through other channels instead.

The company behind Contipay

Contipay is a product of Contitouch, a technology company with operations in both Zambia and Zimbabwe. Besides its foray into online payments, Contitouch also happens to be an internet service provider—the company provides unshared internet to businesses. The company is also a data centre and web hosting provider in addition to being a software development company. Contitouch is the company behind the Pushto Free Wifi Zones.

Contitouch is a subsidiary of Hammer and Tongues, the auction company founded in 1999 which in recent years has diversified into real estate, microfinance, gambling (Africa Bet and Africa Lotto) and e-commerce. H&T’s e-commerce ventures may have been one of the reasons why its subsidiary decided to build an online payments gateway. Hammer & Tongues’ Zimall (a portmanteau of “Zimbabwe” and “mall”) was an ambitious eCommerce platform which seems to have recently suspended its operations due to the prevailing economic conditions in the country.