Good afternoon. The few Mozambicans who can afford a taste for retail therapy may want to accelerate any online shopping they were planning on doing in the coming months. Commercial banks have been lobbying the Bank of Mozambique for limits to be placed on transactions through online shopping platforms. If the reports on social media are correct, the measures would include a temporary ban on certain platforms, including popular shopping websites like Shein and Aliexpress. Those reports might not be accurate, but what is certain is that banks want limits placed on spending through credit cards.
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This is yet another symptom of Mozambique’s chronic foreign currency shortage. Businesses struggle to get US dollars or South African rand from commercial banks in order to import goods, so they (illegally) use credit cards to import them instead. Consumers who have difficulty obtaining foreign currency in Mozambique use cash machines abroad to make withdrawals in foreign currency. As a result, credit card spending has quadrupled in the past year. Commercial banks have found it increasingly difficult to settle their bills with payment services companies like Visa. The Bank of Mozambique did impose a spending cap of MZN6m ($94,000) a year on credit cards last year, but this did not make much difference, since hardly anyone has that kind of money to spend on a credit card. So the banks want tighter restrictions. Already, commercial banks have been blocking payments which they think are inappropriate, such as credit cards being used repeatedly to pay the same amount of money in order to get around the limits on payment amounts, to buy goods for import.
