Editorial | Oct 30,2021
At a high-profile event held at the Sheraton Addis last week, the launch of Dashen Bank’s new digital remittance platform was marked by the attendance of notable figures in the financial sector. Mamo Mihretu, governor of the Central Bank; Abie Sano, president of the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia (CBE) and the Ethiopian Bankers’ Association; and Asfaw Alemu, president of Dashen Bank, also the association’s vice president saw the new system of an agency remittance model seamlessly integrated with ET Switch, the national payment switch operated by EthSwitch. The key promise is real-time transfer capability to over 30 domestic banks, with a crucial incentive to banks, including the provision of 100pc upfront foreign currency, a compelling feature in a country besieged by chronic foreign exchange shortages.
GiftEthiopia.com, a novel feature attached to the platform, adds an e-commerce dimension. It allows diaspora users to not only send money but also buy and deliver goods or “gift items” directly to recipients in Ethiopia. This multi-layered offering of foreign currency inflows, e-commerce, and convenience seeks to unlock both emotional and financial capital from the diaspora. However, the Governor issued a sober warning that the informal channels through which much of the diaspora’s remittances flow pose an “existential risk” to macroeconomic stability. The new platform appears to be targeting these parallel market routes squarely by offering competitive convenience and transparency, rather than relying solely on regulatory enforcement.
The system’s architecture, a unified gateway for multiple international money transfer operators (IMTOs), is designed to address one of the most frequent customer complaints of a lack of flexibility and high fees. Asfaw (left) and Abie (right) echoed these sentiments, positioning the platform as an industry-wide response to structural inefficiencies and consumer dissatisfaction.
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