Zoona: A Case Study on Third Party Innovation in Digital Finance

This paper explores Zoona’s story in detail, with the hopes that other third party providers operating in digital finance and mobile money will be encouraged by Zoona’s success in Zambia and glean key insights from its experiences. Specifically, the Zoona story demonstrates that: 1. Small players can be competitive in an industry dominated by MNOs; 2. There are alternative business models for delivering digital finance/mobile money that have not been fully explored; and 3. The journey to identifying the value proposition of digital finance is hardly straight forward.