Zoona offers shares to employees and slashes remittance rates

Zoona has announced 2 new developments as it seeks to grow its mobile money service, the introduction of share-buying for its employees and the slashing of its remittance fees by 60%.

Zoona has also introduced an Employee Share Option Plan (ESOP) enabling employees to own Zoona shares. According to Zoona’s Communication and Public Relations Manager Karim Amade on what employees can qualify for this he said, ‘All employees qualify for the share option pool – from the cleaning staff to the CEO. The number of shares an employee is worked out through a formula that weighs seniority and tenure at the company – so the number will be different for every employee. Employees can choose to exercise their options once a year, over a period of four years.”

So if you’re assigned 1,000 shares, you’ll be able to purchase 250 in year one, 250 in year two, etc. Should an employee choose not to exercise their options, these will rollover and they’ll be able to exercise the options in the following year.

Ms Phiri also said Zoona wants to empower many Zambian entrepreneurs, and currently has 600 agents and 1100 outlets countrywide, creating over 2500 jobs since it began its operations.

Zoona has also lowered its remittance rates, with any money over K1000 being transferred costing K100, which is a 60% drop from the previous rates:

This is a very welcome move seeing as the price of everything else is going up. We also see it as a customer attraction move as more people may now prefer to use Zoona to make transfers compared to other remittance services for larger amounts of money. Zoona has confirmed that the price cut is permanent, not a temporary campaign, and that will be the price going forward.

Ms Phiri acknowledged this saying  “The Zambian consumer is under considerable pressure – with prices of everything from food, to fuel, to medicine going up. As a company that was born and bred in Zambia, Zoona wanted to contribute to the solution and not the problem.”

She also said Zoona also has plans to set up shop in Mozambique and Ghana to grow its user base in Africa.