Johannesburg - Customers of Absa who are also MTN users will have free access to the bank’s online app and mobile website, the companies said on Monday.
A partnership between the two companies has enabled the deal while Chinese phone maker Huawei will also preload the banking app on its Huawei Y560 smartphones.
MTN is South Africa’s second biggest mobile network with a reported 28 million subscribers. Meanwhile, Absa is the country’s second biggest bank with just over 9 million customers.
"This partnership is the first of its kind for MTN where we give unparalleled value to our customers by bundling a cost effective LTE device while zero rating access to Absa's banking application,” said Larry Annetts, MTN sales and marketing executive, in a statement.
Moves by telecommunications companies to zero-rate services are becoming more popular in the industry.
Earlier this year, South Africa’s third largest mobile network Cell C inked a deal to provide zero-rated access to social network Facebook while also bringing Internet.org to the country.
However, zero-rated services such as Facebook's Internet.org have come under the spotlight in places such as India over net neutraility issues.
Net neutrality is the concept of treating all internet traffic equally to enable fair competition among businesses on the web.