Old Mutual Zimbabwe says revenues from its banking and insurance operations are now contributing almost equally to group earnings, marking a major strategic shift as the financial services giant broadens income streams and deepens digital expansion.
The evolving revenue mix reflects Old Mutual’s push to build more resilient earnings in a volatile operating environment.
The group has accelerated investment into its fintech platform O’mari, whose customer base surged 54% to more than two million users in 2025.
About 90% of the platform’s users are new customers, with services increasingly focused on nano lending, nano savings and low-cost digital transactions.
In an interview with businessDigest, group chief executive officer Samuel Matsekete said Old Mutual’s revenue composition had changed significantly over the past five years.
“We issued our results, and that was for 2025. And, in those results, you would have seen that the mix is almost balanced, close to 50-50 between banking and non-banking,” Matsekete said.
“You would probably find the life company bringing in about 44%. The bank, about just under 50%. At the moment, the other units are contributing the balance.”
Matsekete said the group had deliberately strengthened linkages across its banking, life assurance and short-term insurance units to improve customer convenience while reinforcing revenue stability.
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“The resilience of the revenues is what the organisation is prioritising,” he said.
The strategy has been anchored on aggressive investment in digital transformation across the business.
“We have been very deliberate in digitalising the whole business. It is an imperative for us to serve customers better.”
“There has been investment directed at how we digitalise our processes to extract efficiencies, but also to ensure that our time to market, our turnaround times are much better.”
Matsekete warned that Zimbabwe’s insurance penetration remained low.
“If I talk about general insurance, which is to cover your properties and liabilities, when penetration is too low, which is less than 3% at the moment, it means the protection gap is very big. It means there are a lot of people carrying risks which are not protected.”
