Today, the Zimbabwe Reserve Bank has issued a directive to reduce bank charges for cash withdrawals.
While many were expecting these charges to be done away with completely, a person still has to pay some money if they want to get their cash from Zimbabwe banks.
Here are the revised charges.
The applicable charges for cash withdrawal is a maximum of one percent and 1,25 percent of amount withdrawn for ATM and OTC.
Now to withdraw US$20 a charge of 20c shall apply on the ATM and US$0,25c OTC, US$50 will attract US$0,50c and US$0,63c and $100 will be charged US$1 and US$1,25.
Before that, the situation was very bad as explained below:
One would pay some cash just to withdraw the daily (bond note) limit of $25 in bond notes from a well-known local bank.
The US Dollar daily ATM withdrawal limit is $50 and one had to pay $2.50 to withdraw this amount.
$5.50 was needed to get the full daily limit of $75.
Looking at the number of Zimbabweans using the banking system, it is very likely that banks are making millions out of nothing simply by charging people who are taking their money out of the banking system.
The new directive minimises the effect of these high charges but it is still a lot for people struggling to make ends meet.
The setup encourages people to horde cash as they will lose money by taking their earnings to banks.
