EcoCash, Zimbabwe's largest mobile money platform, has increased its transaction limits by an average of 230%, allowing wallet holders to send money, pay bills or buy goods and services with greater ease.

According to a transaction schedule released by the EcoCash Holdings unit, mobile money users can now send up to ZW$350 000 a month, up from ZW$280 000. The daily limit for sending money has also gone up to ZW$75 000, from ZW$10 000.

The additional good news to customers is that they can now also send up to ZW$350 000 in four batches of ZW$75 000 in a day.

At the same time, transaction limits for merchant payments have been increased by 50%, to ZW$600 000 per month. The limit was previously set at ZW$400 000 per month.

EcoCash customers who want to exhaust the ZW$600 000 limit in one day have also been given the latitude to do so by conducting four successive transactions of ZW$150 000. This followed the upward revision of the daily transaction limits for merchant payments from ZW$50 000 to ZW$150 000.

The latest development will come as good news to mobile money users who had previously complained that the transaction limits were too low considering the pace at which price of goods and services was rising in the country.

According to Zimstat, the Total Consumption Poverty Line (TCPL) for Zimbabwe stood at $27,297.53 per person in September 2022, translating to ZW$136,487.65 (about US$219.78) for a family of five.

"This means that an individual required that much to purchase both non- food and food items as at September 2022 in order not to be deemed poor. This represents an increase of 2.5 percent when compared to the August 2022 figure of $26,622.83," said Zimstat.