Bitkesh Is A New Service That Allows You To Send Money From South Africa To Zimbabwe ‘Free of Charge’

Good news to Zim folks living in South Africa, you can now send money from South Africa to Zimbabwe free of charge using the Bitkesh service. Indeed, you don’t pay any charges to get your money sent to Zimbabwe. This remittance service is being made possible by a South African-based fintech company called Yolft technology.

How Bitkesh works

Money sent from South Africa using Bitkesh goes straight into a recipient’s EcoCash account. As a matter of fact, EcoCash is the only medium through which one can only receive money sent using Bitkesh. So when the sender successfully makes a transaction, the recipient receives an SMS notification of the money that’s been credited into their Ecocash wallet.

Furthermore, the money received will be RTGS dollars and not US dollars. Bitkesh has an online exchange rate calculator, which tells you how much the receiver can get in RTGS dollars.

Whats needed to us send money using Bitkesh?

You have to download the Bitkesh app on Google Playstore and Appstore to be able to remit money back home. Alternatively, you can just use their website. The process of registering a Bitkesh account is quick such that in less than 3 minutes you will be finished.

You must have a South African Bank account where the money to send will be pulled from. That means if you have hard cash, you first have to deposit in a bank to be able to send it using Bitkesh- it’s somewhat tedious.

It’s also frustrating that you can’t send any amount less than R150 using Bitkesh. To be specific, you cant send any amount below R150 automatically with the app. Bitkesh says if you want to send amounts below that threshold, you have to bear the arduous process of contacting their customer care to manually process such a transaction as their system doesn’t automatically detect amounts below the R150 threshold. Weird.

Can you send from Zimbabwe to South Africa?

Bitkesh says it’s possible to send from Zimbabwe to South Africa without incurring any charges too.

Is it really free?

Of course, a sane person knows that nothing is for free in this world. Although marketed as free, Bitkesh’s service is not actually free, they charge you a fee in a subtle way.

Their fee is stashed in the Rand/RTGS Dollars exchange rate. When you are about to send money, Bitkesh tells how much a certain number of Rands is when converted to RTGS dollars. Bitkesh clearly says that it has “technicians that fix the rate according to the prevailing market conditions” Accordingly, these technicians offer you a rate that’s is slightly lower than the prevailing exchange rate. As a result, the difference between the prevailing exchange rate and Bitkesh’s ‘fixed exchange rate’ is their charge/fee for making it possible to send money using Bitkesh.