Berhan Bank, one of the youngest private commercial banks, has launched a new electronic payment solution for schools, joining the latest national move in digitalising services and payments.

The Bank's payment system is integrated with its latest version of the core banking system dubbed Rubikon Core Banking System. The payment system integrates the account of the school with the identification number of students, enabling parents to pay school fees digitally. Dubbed Berhan School Pay, the system was developed in August 2019 by 10 staff members of the Bank.

The entire process of developing the system took one month, but testing and piloting, as well as consulting with parents and schools, took a year.  The Bank officially launched the solution last week at the premises of the Bank on Africa Avenue with the presence of Getahun Mekuria (PhD), minister of Education and the former minister of Innovation & Technology.

Over the past couple of months, the government has been working on digitising government services and introducing electronic transactions. A few months ago, the National Bank of Ethiopia (NBE) crafted a National Payment Strategy that lays out infrastructure to enable users to make financial transactions using the accounts and payment instruments issued by financial institutions.

Eth-Switch S.C., an entity owned by a consortium of all banks including the central bank, is currently working on Point of Sale (PoS) and mobile account-to-account interoperability, a system that enables financial and non-financial institutions to work with or use the parts or equipment of another system. The parliament has also approved the e-transaction law that supports the government and private institutions to offer e-commerce and e-government services.

"Berhan's school fee solution can also play a considerable role in the national effort to digitise payments," said Abraham Alero, president of the Bank.

So far, Berhan School Pay has enrolled 13 schools and 21,404 students. With the system, parents can transfer the school fee of their kids online at their convenience using each student's identification card.

Normally, student registration used to take a day or half a day for parents, according to Abraham.