Government has awarded a key banking services tender for student allowances to Botswana Savings Bank (BSB), ending a 21-year run held by First National Bank Botswana (FNBB).
The tender, approved by the Ministry of Finance on March 27, will run for three years and covers the provision of digital wallets and the disbursement of student allowances, a significant banking contract.
For over two decades, FNBB has managed student accounts under the programme, benefiting from early customer acquisition as students typically retained their accounts after graduation, upgrading into full service banking clients.
The arrangement has long been viewed as a strategic pipeline for building lifelong customer relationships in Botswana’s competitive banking sector.
However it remains unclear how BSB will fill in the big shoes because unlike traditional commercial banks, BSB operates under a savings bank model as statutory bank and does not have a full commercial banking license.
This raises uncertainty about how it will deliver a nationwide, high-volume payment system typically associated with fully licensed banks, particularly in areas such as transaction processing, merchant integration and scalability.
