It was a humid day out in Addis Abeba's streets where customers sat comfortably away from the heat in a breezy location at a coffee shop, Tomoca, in the old railway station near La Gare. The shop, famous for its aromatic coffee, serves mostly bankers who work around the neighborhood. Around mid-day, a sales agent for E-birr hunting for customers hopped in to persuade them to open an E-birr account that would allow customers to pay for their coffee at the shop.

A novice on the job, Mekdes Alemayehu met with a lot of resistance to the idea of subscribing to a mobile money service, although some people seemed to be open to it. The justifications people gave her were at times laugh-worthy to Mekdes: from people who tell her they already have several mobile money accounts to something along the lines of: "I like the feel of cash." She hears them all.

In spite of substantial pushback, Mekdes has made it her goal to have clients open at least 15 accounts a day and receives her commission off transactions. She also provides services such as processing deposits and recharging accounts.

The Tomoca branch, its eleventh which opened six months ago as part of the La Gare Eagle Hills Project, partnered with E-birr to act as a merchant agent. Ever since, up to 30 customers a day make payments through E-birr, according to the branch manager, Martha Teshome. The shop's incentive is getting thorough data about its customers, which it uses to reward the regulars.

Two of these customers are Tegistu Gebre and Zerihun Gebru. Both frequent Tomoca, and recently they opened E-birr accounts. Zerihun has a little more practice with mobile banking services as he uses them to transfer credit for his job driving for ride-hailing companies. Tegistu is fairly new to digital payment systems, despite his brief attempt at using CBE-Birr. He gave up after finding it difficult to get used to. He compares getting accustomed to mobile banking services to trying out a new coffee place; both need a little nudge and a little guidance.

Mobile money has steadily been gaining popularity. Pioneered by M-Birr in 2016 following two years of pilot testing, its service has mobilised two million users over the past six years. Overseeing close to 2,700 branches, no less than 17,000 agents, and over 10,000 merchants, M-birr has a strong footing in this thriving market. But it is not alone.

Later the same year, a Dutch company, Belcash, joined the market to launch Hellocash, partnering with various microfinance institutions and banks, including the Somali Microfinance Institution, the Cooperative Bank of Oromia and Wegagen Bank.

Coop-E-birr, branded for the Cooperative Bank of Oromia, provides a range of mobile financial services, including utility payments, bank transfers, remittances, merchant payments and mobile top-up.

Although the industry faces hurdles in digital adaptability and low integrity of connectivity infrastructure, chief among these challenges is interoperability.

Interoperability is a crucial tool these companies are using for the ease of banking and mobile money services. It is recognised as a financial inclusion tool as it encourages people to actually use services beyond just subscribing. Improving interoperability is listed as one of 11 key intervention areas to promote financial inclusion, according to a study conducted by Precise Consult International, a finance and business consultancy. The functionality is relevant to mobile banking, mobile wallets and mobile money.

"Interoperability between payment services is crucial in expanding the ecosystem and bringing about cashless trading," says Abebe Mulu, director of business development at E-birr.

E-birr is now conducting testing to allow inter-bank transactions from within the app. These payment services are one of the backbones of technological advancement in the financial sector. In Ethiopia, where technological innovations are in their infancy, the lack of an integrated payment system has been a drag for years and continues to be so.

The lack of digital payment services is indeed a common problem faced by most tech startups, especially those in e-commerce, according to Markos Lemma, the founder of Iceaddis.

"We're still doing cash on delivery due to payment issues," he said.

The unavailability of adequate application programming interfaces (APIs), a computer interface that allows for interaction between two systems, is also an issue. In mobile payments, APIs provided by banks can be used by digital platforms to facilitate payment. Markos has observed that banks do not actually want anything that connects to their core services.

The difficulty to seamlessly process online payments with and between banks remains one of the bottlenecks start-ups face to move forward in an evolving market.

Monetisation is a new buzzword used by those ambitious enough to make it in the digital economy. One of these is Dawit Abraham, one of the brains behind Qene Games, founded in 2017. The local startup works on online game development, and all three mobile games the company makes available online require digital payments infrastructure to make money.

"Even if we build a good game, it would be difficult to monetise in Ethiopia," Dawit told Fortune. "We were initially building games for the Ethiopian market; the lack of such payments has significantly affected our growth."

Qene is now pushing its developers to come up with a mobile app store as an alternative for the Google and Apple stores and plans to integrate as many payment services as possible.

However, the industry has seen innovative attempts to address gaps in interoperability. YenePay Financial Services Technology Plc, established in 2015, is one player that has developed a system to allow interoperability. After years of development, the YenePay application was launched a year ago, allowing its users to transact between banks and merchants. It works in partnership with five mobile banking services under the banks: Amole, CBE-Birr, Hellocash of Anbessa Bank, Wegagen Bank and M-birr. Within a year, it has managed to attract close to 30,000 users.

The surge in the number of users is consistent with the growth in the number of mobile banking services. It increased by 101pc last year, and mobile device transactions jumped by almost 130pc to 68.3 billion Br.

Endashaw Tesfaye, the deputy CEO of MOSS ICT Consultancy, attributes this significant jump in usage to several reasons but primarily to the impact of COVID-19.