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Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, a city of over 5.7 million people is brimming with vibrant energy, feels safe and driving fast its digitalisation programme as per the Governments 2025 and 2030 digitalisation plans. As a country Ethiopia has at least 132 million people, making it surprisingly the 10th most populous country in the world and 2nd most populous in Africa after Nigeria.
My last visit nearly eight months ago was a surprise. The city surprised on the upside as it was not what I was expecting, and neither was the level of ambition amongst the banks and payment switches. We arrived in a city full of infrastructure projects with what seemed like almost every major artery road amid construction. Banks (the larger ones) had moved into new modern skyscraper like buildings.
This latest trip was focussed on meeting with our local in-country partner Savvy Information Technologies. Together we
- hosted two seminars under the banner of driving digital experiences, one for issuing and one for acquiring, and
- featured as headline sponsors for the 1-day Digibank event, with a keynote talk on “how bank card issuers can deliver hyper personalised experiences at fintech speed (like Revolut)” and a panel session “building a cash-lite economy: Ethiopia’s digital payments journey”, and
- having key meetings with executives of the two industry payment leaders and some of the largest banks
Rapid Progress
Whilst the few days in market were busy, once again Addis Ababa pleasantly surprised us. Those roads which caused traffic congestion on the last visit – completed, and now allowing a fast 20-minute journey from airport into the city heart saving over 40 minutes. These same roads are now adorned with tall, bright lighting compared to dark roads previously. Along most of the completed roads there are new buildings constructed some finalised, many in the final stages.
In some areas complete zones are finished with new green spaces and parks for the public to enjoy. In other areas there are still ambitious re-development plans just starting.
More broadly, the 2030 vision of the government will see huge investment projects in many fields. Addis Ababa is already the seat of the African Union and hosts the seat of the United Nations of Africa. Already the national airline is the largest in Africa and flies the most connecting routes in Africa. The government has recently started the rollout of the digital identity cards.
Within the last few months, the government devalued its local currency (Birr) to float freely against the $ USD. This has created significant short-term impacts on the economy and its citizens, as it’s caused the local currency dropping 50% of its value, making USD$ based costs double in real terms for Ethiopia. Banks are having to scale back some of their ambitious investments, however the government has also passed laws allowing foreign property and foreign company ownership e.g. the local banknote supplier has just been bought by a Japanese company. In addition, laws have been implemented to expand the Ethiopian Stock Exchange, introduce investment banking and foreign exchange trading and allow foreign banks to now enter the market.
This creates new opportunities and threats for the banks in market so key decisions and investment decisions are having to be made.
Two Sides of the same Coin
Against the above backdrop the payments industry is desperate to innovate and digitalise. The local mobile money scheme run by Ethiopian Telecom has grown rapidly in a relatively short period of time.
The local payments industry for cost and sovereignty reasons has its own domestic scheme which is on the verge of rolling out contactless cards. The primary challenge this has faced is the choice to use CPACE as its standard, this is selected as a domestic alternative to Visa and Mastercard schemes. A growing number of African countries are implementing or exploring the same strategy as the fees that can be saved versus international scheme solutions can be substantial for such a populous nation (circa 132m people).
The issue is that there are no or few known vendors that support CPACE within Digital Wallets (NFC Host card emulators like Google Pay/Apple Pay) that can then support tokenisation. Another issue is that whilst there is a high volume of changes being pushed through still, there is a mandate to have on soil (not public cloud hosted) solutions. This makes moving the project forward a challenge for those banks that operate their own card issuing capability, as well as the two national switches (EthSwitch and Premier Switch Solutions).
In the absence of a clear, proven, tested solution to this problem, many of the large banks are turning to issuing debit cards from the major schemes Visa and Mastercard. Currently there are just two or three banks who recently launched credit cards, and this will be a further area of future growth for the schemes.
If a solution to CPACE is not found soon one must question at what point Ethiopia will decide to leapfrog CPACE and seek to adopt the future open standard C-8. This is an area the banks and national switches will need to include in their future scenario planning.
As things currently stand Ethiopia would be well advised to look at their neighbours Kenya which faced with a strong mobile money competing solution chose to accelerate the rollout of virtual card issuance. For many Ethiopian banks and the national switch this is a good strategy that can also build local knowledge and learning as tokenisation of the virtual cards can be done in the bank’s mobile wallet (currently none of the X-Pay Apps (Google/Samsung) appear to have immediate launch plans for the market despite its size). The benefit of a virtual card issuance strategy is that it can be much faster to launch, a simpler integration project and as there are no plastic production, printing, or personalisation costs, overall this is a lower cost option especially with a currency that continues to devalue.
A surprise on the visit was the lack of awareness of virtual card issuance and little to no awareness of the fact that many leading fintech and neobanks have successfully used this as a launch strategy that has underpinned their growth and success. It would be worth the local banks being aware of some of the digital journeys that leading fintech’s from Europe have taken.
The other side of the coin
In markets where a major X-Pay Wallet has not entered, most banks struggle to educate customers on how to use the tokenised card in their bank wallets. After all, if you can’t use and spend your funds on the contactless card you get little volume.
Contactless POS terminals are in market. My colleague successfully paid for coffee using his phone and his tokenised card within his digital wallet. However, the volume of these terminals is limited to major cities and are still not in great volume. A fast way to accelerate these would be to introduce SoftPOS or Tap to Phone solutions which make use of smartphones. But another hurdle is that low cost smartphones often don’t the chipset for the NFC capability. Making them ineligible or incompatible for SoftPOS payment acceptance.
As such the market will need to work out how to leapfrog this and provide the relevant smartphone devices to the merchants.
Whilst this symbiotic ecosystem develops it would again appear that launching a virtual issued travel card with currency capability is an ideal launch strategy for banks aimed at business owners and higher wealth customers who do travel internationally.
The iceberg
Perhaps not surprising given all these new concepts to the industry the other aspect which caught our attention was that little thought had been given to what happens aften the initial phase of digitalisation. It is case studies and knowledge like this that international vendors like Stanchion Payment Solutions can greatly add to banks in emerging markets.
For example, when you digitalise either the issuing or acquiring functions there is an increased need to make more use of calls to the cryptographic encryption devices like hardware security modules. Few banks realise that several months after tokenisation is adopted by a customer, the ease of use via on-device biometric authentication means many customers forget their PIN. If the ability to view or set a new PIN is not offered in the banks mobile app, the bank will face increased cost and be overwhelmed in their branch and contact centres from customers seeking help.
Another example is when you go digital there is an increased need to have better, faster transaction monitoring and fraud management solutions to reduce fraud. Especially as cards will be increasingly used in eCommerce scenarios. We discovered a lack of current awareness for initiatives like dynamic CSC/CVV2 which can be valuable to reduce fraud.
With all the above said, Ethiopia is proving it’s on a mission, a rapid one to digitalise. They have a good track record on executing on their ambitious goals. We believe the industry will find solutions to some of its current obstacles and the larger banks do have substantial customer bases through which to recover business case return on investment.
Having completed our second visit, we remain of the opinion we can add value to the industry and bring international experience, solutions and payment fabric product technology to help the banks deliver their product roadmap. We are looking forward to our next visit in a few months’ time.
By Norman Frankel, Chief Growth Officer, Stanchion Payments Solutions (Norman Frankel | LinkedIn)
About Stanchion Payments
Stanchion Payments is a global Fintech solution provider with a leadership position in creating Payment Fabric technology, and powering payment change. Our technology offers payment integration capabilities, enabling the modernisation, transformation, accelerated innovation and efficient management of payment systems. Over the past two decades, Stanchion has expanded its offerings and solutions across the globe with offices in South Africa, Australia, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States.
