It is with great pleasure that our company announces the launch of telebirr, its Mobile Money Service on May 11, 2021, after undertaking all the necessary preparations towards its realization.
Telebirr is the first of its kind in our country and it is a good news for our community as it is accessible, affordable and easy to use; and it is also a great achievement and milestone for our company given our strong desire to serve our people.
Mobile money services will narrow the financial inclusion gap in our country, enable people to get a better, faster and easier financial services at a lower transaction cost. Financial Inclusion is an economic concept that makes all financial services accessible to all sections of the society, and mobile money services are an important solution to ensure financial inclusion. In addition to creating a healthy money flow, telebirr service will increase the overall development of the nation and wellbeing of our people by increasing savings, reducing poverty, encouraging
entrepreneurship and investment, reducing printing costs and eventually boosting the economy.
We have made an extensive preparation, particularly to implement the best-in-class mobile money technology, deploy appropriate policies and procedures, and develop agent networks since our application for operation license. We have benchmarked and taken lessons from banking and telecom industries to offer the best mobile money solutions to our valued customers and the entire community, with a major focus and greater efforts to provide financial services to low-income citizens and rural people, who do not have access to banking services.
Many institutions are involved in providing the service to our community, especially all financial and microfinance institutions, international remittance companies, master agents and agents recruited to bring the service closer to our customers. So far, more than 1,600 agents are onboard and the number of agents will increase to more than 15,000 within a year to ensure accessibility and convenience to our customers.
In addition to transferring, receiving and paying money using telebirr, we are working with various service providers to create a conducive environment for transactions, such as water and sewerage services, electric service, revenue authorities, supermarkets, gas stations, aid agencies, cafeterias and restaurants, transport service providers, and print media to mention a few.
Now, telebirr service is live and services such as depositing cash, sending and receiving money, withdrawing cash, airtime top-up, bill payment, merchant payment, mobile ticketing, fundraising, bulk disbursement can be accessed using telebirr app, USSD and SMS. We will introduce various new services and many more actors to increase penetration and develop the ecosystem. Furthermore, we will work to expand the service horizons and bring more economic benefits to our community.
In addition, we are working with international remittance companies to launch a service that allows our customers to receive remittances easily and at a low cost, on which we are working on integration and due diligence to make it available in a few weeks. The service is of additional national benefit in rerouting 15 to 20% of the grey market remittances into the formal economy.
We will launch and enhance economically impactful financial services such as micro saving, micro credit and other related digital financial services in collaboration with the relevant entities and fulfilling all the necessary conditions. Such enhanced service will play a significant role in the overall transformation and improvement of our society and will bring significant economic change in addition to ensuring access to financial services.
As we said that telebirr service will play a major role in narrowing the financial inclusion gap, we are currently working to increase financial inclusion at least by 25 to 30% and improve the overall national financial inclusion to 60%.
Working with all stakeholders and wider ecosystem, we are planning to make 40% to 50% of Ethiopian economic transactions through telebirr service in the next five years.
On this occasion, we would like to respectfully call upon all stakeholders, especially financial institutions, businesses and service providers, governmental and nongovernmental institutions, to work together with us to make the telebirr service more productive and to fulfill the country’s efforts to meet the digital financial needs and build a digital economy.
Source: Ethio telecom