Real-time banking on the core you already run.
Pulse gives banks, microfinance institutions, building societies and wallets in Zimbabwe instant payments, fraud decisions in milliseconds, digital lending, a customer app and RBZ reporting. It connects to your existing core banking system, so you modernise without a replacement project.
- Five API operationsconnect any core: FLEXCUBE, Essence, Transact, Finacle, Mambu or in-house.
- Every payment scoredfor fraud before money moves, with reasons your team can read.
- Regulator-readysupervision data, disputes and returns built in, not bolted on.
One payment through Pulse
USD 45.00 sent by phone number to another bank
-
0 msPayment requested in the bank's appTo 0771 *** 002, idempotency key checked
-
14 msPayee confirmed: Rudo C., Kopje BankFrom the national phone-number directory
-
41 msFraud check: 12 of 100 AllowedKnown device, usual amount, payee not on the mule register
-
77 msDebit posted in your core banking systemThrough your integration layer; your core stays the system of record
-
139 msSent on ZIPIT and settledISO 20022 message; if it does not settle, Pulse reverses it automatically
-
162 msCustomer notified, ledger and RBZ feed updatedReceipt by SMS or WhatsApp; both banks' books balance
Illustrative timings. Pulse is designed to decide and move a payment in under 200 milliseconds.
Built to connect to the systems Zimbabwe already runs
- Oracle FLEXCUBE
- Finastra Essence
- Temenos Transact
- Infosys Finacle
- Mambu
- ZIPIT
- RBZ RTGS
- EcoCash
- OneMoney
- InnBucks
- ZESA
- ZIMRA
The gaps institutions are paying for today
Most of the sector still runs on batch files, manual reconciliation and fraud reviews after the fact. Each gap costs money, customers and the regulator's confidence.
| Today | With Pulse |
|---|---|
| Failed transfers and bill payments are chased by hand, and customers wait days for their money back. | A payment that does not confirm is reversed automatically, and the customer is told at every step. |
| Fraud is discovered after the money has already left the bank. | Every payment is scored before it moves. Risky ones are paused for a scam check or a step-up on the customer's phone. |
| A new digital product means a change request to the core banking vendor and months of waiting. | Products run beside your core and are switched on per institution by licence, without touching the core. |
| Credit decisions take days, so customers borrow elsewhere or not at all. | Salary advances, buy-now-pay-later and loans are decided in seconds, with reasons a customer and an auditor can read. |
| Each institution fights mule accounts and scams on its own. | Fraud signals are shared across every institution on the network, so a scam seen once is blocked everywhere. |
| Supervisory returns are compiled in spreadsheets, weeks after the fact. | The regulator sees sector data as it happens, and returns are drafted straight from the ledger. |
| More than 80% of transactions are still made in US dollars. | Tariffs can favour ZiG payments, making the local currency the cheaper choice for customers. |
US dollar share: Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, 2026 Monetary Policy Statement.
Built for every institution the Reserve Bank supervises
One platform, configured for each institution's licence. A credit-only microfinance institution and a commercial bank get the products that fit them, on the same rails.
Add real-time services without a core replacement project
Keep FLEXCUBE, Essence, Transact or Finacle as your system of record. Pulse adds the real-time layer your customers already expect from the best apps they use.
- Instant payments by phone number, national QR, request-to-pay, billers and wallets.
- Fraud and scam shield with step-up on new payees and devices, and explainable scores.
- Digital lending: salary advances, buy-now-pay-later and loans decided in seconds.
- A branded customer app, plus WhatsApp and USSD in English, Shona and Ndebele.
- Customer 360: one live view of every account, payment and product.
- Ledger, net settlement and statement reconciliation that your finance team can audit.
You connect: your core through five API operations, and your change-data feed for postings made at branches and ATMs.
A working loan book on day one, even without a core system
Most of Zimbabwe's 300-plus microfinance institutions have the least technology and serve the customers who need credit most. Pulse gives them a modern platform priced for their size.
- A ready ledger for loan accounts if you have no core system yet, or a connector if you do.
- KYC tiers, credit scoring and collections, with reasons for every decision.
- Repayments by wallet and phone number, matched to loans automatically.
- Board and RBZ reporting drafted from the books, not from spreadsheets.
Credit-only institutions get lending, KYC, risk and channels; deposit products stay off, as their licence requires.
Bring savers and members onto digital channels
Building societies, POSB and development finance institutions get the same rails as the largest banks, sized to their customers.
- Savings, deposits and transfers in the customer app and on USSD for any phone.
- Diaspora remittances straight into accounts, with beneficiaries at home.
- Loan servicing and statements, with notifications in the customer's language.
- Shared fraud protection from the national mule and scam register.
You connect: your core banking system, or start on the Pulse ledger while you migrate.
Interoperate with every bank through one directory
Wallet users can pay and be paid by phone number at any participating institution, through one national directory and one QR standard.
- Push and pull with banks, with confirmations and automatic reversals.
- Merchant QR acceptance that every bank and wallet app can scan.
- Shared fraud signals so mule wallets are flagged before money lands.
- Settlement and reconciliation reports per cycle and per counterparty.
You connect: your wallet platform's push, pull and callback APIs.
See the sector as it moves
Supervision on live data instead of templates and spreadsheets, with every alert explained and every action left to supervisors.
- A supervision workspace with an attention queue, league tables and institution drill-downs.
- Disputes with fixed deadlines, escalated automatically and ruled on by the regulator.
- A national mule and scam register fed by every institution on the network.
- Monthly supervisory reports and data exports, plus public statistics on ZiG use and uptime.
Read-only access across institutions; personal identifiers are pseudonymised before they leave an institution.
One API for every institution on the network
Build once and reach banks, microfinance institutions and wallets through the same documented API, with partner access granted by each institution.
- OpenAPI reference with cURL, Go and Node samples for every operation.
- Sandbox keys in minutes and a ledger you can fund for testing.
- Signed webhooks for payments, disputes and loans, with retries.
- Idempotent writes and clear errors, so retries never move money twice.
Everything a modern institution runs, in one platform
Each capability is an API and a product you can switch on per institution. Use one, or all of them.
Move money
- Instant payments
- Account, phone number, QR, wallet and biller payments over the cheapest suitable rail.
- ZIPIT and RTGS
- ISO 20022 messages, settlement confirmations and returns.
- Request-to-pay
- Billers and merchants send a request the customer approves in one tap.
- Self-healing payments
- Anything that does not confirm in time is reversed automatically.
Decide
- Fraud scoring
- Rules and machine learning in milliseconds, with reasons on every decision.
- Credit and lending
- Scoring, offers, disbursement, schedules, accruals and collections.
- Anti-money laundering
- Screening, transaction monitoring and draft suspicious transaction reports.
- Model training
- Fraud models retrained on your own outcomes and tested in shadow first.
Serve customers
- Customer app
- A fast app that works on low-end phones and patchy networks.
- WhatsApp and USSD
- An assistant that explains, advises and transacts in three languages.
- Onboarding
- Digital KYC with tiered limits and device binding.
- Notifications and statements
- Receipts, alerts and statements in the customer's language.
Run and report
- General ledger
- Double-entry books for every payment, fee, tax and loan.
- Net settlement
- Settlement cycles between institutions, reconciled against bank statements.
- Regulatory returns
- Payments, fraud, disputes and credit returns drafted from the ledger.
- Data platform
- Every event kept in a lakehouse for analytics and model training.
From sandbox to production, one product at a time
No big-bang cutover. Your core stays the system of record throughout, and every step is reversible.
-
Try it today
Get a sandbox institution with API keys and a working ledger. Run payments, loans and disputes end to end.
Day one -
Connect your core
Your integration team exposes five operations. Load your customers and transaction history so every view is complete.
Weeks, not months -
Run in shadow
Pulse scores your real traffic without deciding anything, so you compare its fraud and credit calls with your own.
Evidence for your board and the RBZ -
Go live product by product
Start with payments or lending, then add the app, the assistant and reporting as each proves itself.
At your pace
A national layer that gets safer with every institution that joins
Pay-by-phone across institutions, a shared fraud register and real-time supervision only work when institutions share one network. Pulse is that network, built on the rails Zimbabwe already has.
- Pay anyone, at any institutionSend to a phone number or scan one national QR, whatever bank or wallet the other person uses.
- One shared fraud shieldA mule account reported by one institution is flagged for every other institution before money lands.
- One place to report and resolveDisputes between institutions run on fixed deadlines, with the regulator ruling on escalations.
- Supervision in real timeThe Reserve Bank sees liquidity, fraud and conduct signals as they happen, not weeks later.
Built to the standard a central bank expects
Security is in the architecture, not a feature list. These are the controls your risk and IT audit teams will ask about.
Every record keyed to its institution
Tenant isolation is enforced in every service and every query. One institution can never read another's data.
Services prove who they are
Each service signs its own requests and peers accept only the calls they need, over mutual TLS.
Decisions you can explain
Every fraud and credit decision carries its reasons, so customers, auditors and supervisors can see why.
Policies sealed and signed
Fraud and credit tuning ships in encrypted, signed bundles, never in code, and unsigned policies are refused.
Personal data protected
Phone numbers, national IDs and accounts are pseudonymised before they leave an institution, in line with the Cyber and Data Protection Act.
Your choice of hosting
Run in the cloud region you choose or in a Zimbabwean data centre. It deploys on any Kubernetes cluster.
Priced like infrastructure, not like a licence
You pay for what your customers use. There is no core replacement to fund and nothing to buy before you see results.
- No core replacementPulse works with the core banking system you have, so there is no multi-year migration to pay for.
- No upfront licence feePricing is per transaction and per active customer, so cost grows only as your digital business grows.
- Free sandboxBuild and test for as long as you need at no cost.
- Fair for smaller institutionsA microfinance institution pays for its own volume, not a bank's, and only for the products its licence allows.
- Shared costs, shared benefitsThe fraud register, phone-number directory and national rails are run once for the whole network.
An API your developers will like
The same API powers the customer app, WhatsApp, USSD and your partners. Your developers can send their first payment in the sandbox in minutes.
- Short-lived tokens from an institution API key
- Idempotency keys on every write, so retries are always safe
- Signed webhooks for payments, disputes and loans
- A full OpenAPI reference with code samples
curl -X POST https://pulse.vantage.co.zw/v1/payments \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN" \
-H "Idempotency-Key: order-1042" \
-d '{
"customer_id": "cus_9ff08cd4c399f897",
"from_account": "DESIGNBAFC1000259",
"to": { "phone": "+263781234567" },
"amount": { "minor": 2500, "currency": "USD" }
}'
# 200 OK: scored, posted and settled
# { "payment_id": "pay_...", "status": "completed",
# "decision": { "action": "allow", "score": 12 } }Questions executives ask us
Do we have to replace our core banking system?
No. Your core stays the system of record. Pulse calls it through five operations (open account, get account, post, reverse, issue card) exposed by your integration layer, and reads postings made elsewhere through your change-data feed. Institutions without a core can start on the Pulse ledger.
Where is our data hosted, and who can see it?
You choose: a cloud region or a data centre in Zimbabwe. Every record is keyed to your institution and no other institution can read it. The regulator gets read-only supervisory access, and personal identifiers are pseudonymised before they leave your institution.
What happens if Pulse is unavailable?
Pulse fails closed: it never pretends money moved. Payments that cannot complete are reversed automatically, every write is idempotent so retries are safe, and your core banking system keeps running independently.
How do we know the fraud and credit models work for our customers?
Run them in shadow first. Pulse scores your real traffic and logs its decisions without acting on them, so you compare outcomes with your current process before switching anything on. Models are retrained on your own confirmed outcomes.
How does this help us with the Reserve Bank?
Supervisory data, dispute deadlines and draft returns come straight from the ledger, and the shared fraud register supports the RBZ's work on mule accounts and scams. Your shadow-mode results also give the RBZ evidence before you launch a new product.
How long does a pilot take, and what does it cost?
A pilot has a fixed scope and price agreed upfront: a sandbox, your core connected, shadow scoring on your traffic and one live product. Ask us for a proposal sized to your institution.
Put your institution on real-time rails this quarter
Tell us which products matter most to you. We will come back with a pilot plan, a timeline and a price.