Commercial Bank of Africa (CBA) and Safaricom Limited have introduced a fixed deposit feature on the M-Shwari platform dubbed Lock Savings Account.
The Lock Savings Account, will afford Kenyans an opportunity to save for a specific purpose. The move is aimed at entrenching a savings culture in a country where savings fall below 20% of the GDP, the lowest in the region.
Customers will be able to save a minimum of Kshs. 500 for a maximum of six months at interest rates of up to 6% p.a. To access the Lock Savings Account feature, customers will need to dial *234*6# and follow the prompt.
Speaking on the launch, Jeremy Ngunze, CBA Kenya’s Chief Executive Officer said, “We introduced this new feature on the strength of recurrent customer feedback which suggested the need for a facility which would inherently instill in them the discipline required to make medium term savings towards a specific goal.â€
The award winning M-Shwari service was launched at the tail end of 2012 and has seen CBA’s loan accounts grow by more than 800% from 89,000 in 2012 to 897,000 in December last year making the bank the country’s top retail lender. M-Shwari has over 7M customers who have in the last 2 years transacted more than KES 156 Bn and taken out loans worth KES 13 Bn.
A replica service launched in Tanzania by CBA and Vodacom dubbed M-Pawa, has registered 250,000 customers in the three weeks it has been in the market; underlying the disruptive power of the M-PESA proposition in the region.