Far beyond ensuring its core connectivity services nationwide, Ethio Telecom, a pioneer in Africa’s telecom sector with 130 years of dedicated service, is actively leading significant infrastructure projects crucial for societal transformation and economic development in the continent. In addition, the company is significantly geared towards advancing “Digital Ethiopia” by widely introducing and making digital solutions. As a leading brand with a customer base of 78.3 million, it has played an enabling role in the multifaceted development of the country. It is the second largest of the 195 telecom operators on the African continent, and the 17th largest of the 778 operators worldwide.
In alignment with these commitments, Ethio Telecom launched telebirr, a mobile money solution on May 11, 2021, which has revolutionised financial inclusion, simplifying the life of the society and driving the country’s digital economy geared towards realising a digital Ethiopia within a short period. This mobile money platform empowers millions with a secure, accessible, and convenient way to manage their finances.
New era of financial inclusion
Before telebirr, Ethiopians, especially those in rural areas, faced significant challenges in accessing financial services. Traditional banking systems were lacking reach, and cash transactions were cumbersome and insecure. Telebirr addressed this gap by offering a user-friendly mobile money solution accessible through any Ethio telecom SIM card. Customers can register themselves or visit a service centre for hassle-free registration.
Developed in collaboration with Chinese ICT giant Huawei, telebirr, Ethiopia’s first operator-led mobile money platform, has witnessed a surprisingly high adoption rate, by acquiring 47.55 million subscribers within just 3 years of its launch, while handling transactions worth more than 2.55 trillion Birr.
Telebirr goes far beyond basic mobile wallet functionalities like cashing in and out, buying airtime, paying bills, and remitting money locally and internationally; it fosters financial empowerment by partnering with two leading financial institutions, Dashen Bank and Commercial Bank of Ethiopia. This collaboration, since its launch in August 2022, is facilitating micro saving, microcredit, overdraft and salary credit, ensuring customers’ access to financial services and promoting financial inclusion. As a result, microloan services of over ETB 12.88 Billion were provided to 5.32 Million customers whereas 2.15 million customers were able to save ETB 13.35 Billion.
In addition to advancing financial inclusion, telebirr is facilitating the country’s digital transformation. It is simplifying the lives of individuals, while enabling businesses and public enterprises to digitalise their services to increase their productivity and efficiency.
Keeping its innovation game going, telebirr recently upgraded to “telebirr SuperApp,” which provides access to multiple services for Ethiopians through engaging mini-apps. The telebirr SuperApp has been integrated with multiple ecosystem players like government services, private companies, and the African country’s start-ups so they can easily access and be accessed by the 47.55 million customers of telebirr. Online public services such as e-government services have now been made possible, enabling hassle-free cashless transactions for customers.
People can now pay their taxes, utility bills, and other fees using their smartphones. The Ethiopian government’s recent move towards cashless payments for fuel transactions shows what a powerful and promising tool telebirr is.
Supporting this growing ecosystem, telebirr has 157 master agents, 215k agents, 195.6k merchants, and 28 banks working in tandem. With over 52 public and private institutions integrated into telebirr, it has emerged as the most interoperable mobile money platform in Ethiopia.
Gateway to a digital ecosystem
Telebirr’s success stems from its extension network coverage across Ethiopia (99.2%), as well as from its large customer base of more than 78.3 million, its 302,140 point-of-presence through partners, and its distributors, retailers, franchisees and service centres. The localised names assigned to the services and the commission-based structure for customers and agents have helped create widespread acceptance of telebirr.
Aggressive social media campaigns and referral marketing programmes such as cashback, cash for recharge, and other future transactions were launched. Partnerships are a key success factor. An integrator has been engaged to integrate merchant platforms across a wide network of retail and business partners, allowing customers in supermarkets, companies in entertainment and hospitality services, hospitals, pharmacies, and cafes to pay service charges using telebirr.
Telebirr aspires to become a digital marketplace and the largest FinTech platform supporting the digital economies of Ethiopia and Africa. Ethio Telecom desires to facilitate the digitalisation of industries such as education, agriculture, gaming, health, lifestyle, and more. At the same time, it aims to help telebirr evolve into a payment lifestyle brand that gives customers a one-stop shop for all of their financial service needs.
Telebirr is playing a crucial role in digitalising fuel payment which helps the Ethiopian government to control fuel stock, automate processes, reduce foreign exchange strain as well as for real-time monitoring and efficient fuel distribution.
“While implementing telebirr, diverse sets of challenges were faced such as a lack of digital literacy, regulatory challenges, and building a reliable agent network. Lack of awareness of the platform in low-income markets and rural areas prevented widespread adoption among merchants in those areas. It has built an agent structure by developing its existing airtime distribution channel,” Ethio Telecom CEO Frehiwot Tamiru told International Finance.
Knowing the telebirr ecosystem
Through telebirr, the user can conveniently receive money via his/her mobile number sent from family members, friends, loved ones and/or others residing abroad. To enable the smooth functioning of international remittance services, the venture has established partnerships with TalkRemit, Remitly, Taptap Send, RIA Money Transfer, MasterRemit, Moneytrans and Majority, covering regions like Europe, United States, Canada and Australia under the service’s ambit.
Strengthening its commitment to innovation a groundbreaking telebirr feature: “telebirr Engage” was launched in April 2024. This feature has transformed the platform into a comprehensive social and financial hub. Users can chat, send money, share locations, create groups, send photos and videos, request money, pay bills, and buy airtime and packages, all within the telebirr ecosystem free of charge.
Further solidifying its commitment to a thriving digital economy, telebirr recently added a dedicated developer section on its website. This section empowers app developers to create and launch innovative apps that seamlessly integrate with the telebirr platform which fosters a collaborative culture, shares expertise, cultivates an online community of developers, and ensures an inclusive and innovative ecosystem.
Huawei: The powerful ally
Huawei has played a crucial role in the tremendous success of telebirr in Ethiopia, significantly contributing to its establishment.
Since the development of the Mobile Money platform started in 2012, Huawei has deployed its platform across all of the existing mobile finance markets and is now expanding across Asia and Africa to more than 50 markets. According to the published mobile financial services data in emerging market, Huawei’s platform supports more than 50% of the global FinTech market activity. In total, Huawei’s Mobile Money platform now provides access to digital financial services to over 450 million people in markets worldwide who otherwise would not have this benefit.
Huawei is committed to continuously investing in the FinTech domain, focusing on innovation, technology development, and overall industry development. Huawei offers a one-stop Mobile Money platform, supporting distributed full-cloud architecture, with scalable capacity expansion. The open architecture complies with the TMF ODA standard, and mini-programme low-code platform, supporting a diverse ecosystem.
Telebirr is a mobile money service launched in 2021 by Ethio Telecom and empowered by Huawei. The key factors for the success of telebirr are positioning mobile money as a strategic business, creating a clear business plan and establishing a win-win partnership. Telebirr and Huawei, as business partners, encountered and addressed three primary challenges together.
The first challenge is how to rapidly develop users, which is addressed by reusing and expanding the existing telecom agent network, and bundling telecom services for cross-marketing and fission marketing. The second challenge is how to provide more services for users and expand the transaction flow. The approach is to identify industry pain points and persuade industries to go digital, to solve the problems, such as low efficiency, corruption, and tax evasion caused by cash transactions. The third challenge is how to offer convenient real-time credit services for users while ensuring bank partners remain profitable by effectively managing bad debts. This involves building a model based on the analysis of users’ historical data, generating credit scores, and making lending decisions based on credit scores.
All these successful practices can be valuable for global carriers to develop Mobile Money services. Huawei and Ethio Telecom are committed to promoting excellent practices and sharing the experience. In addition, Huawei consolidates the practices to enhance its platform & solution, which greatly lowers the threshold for other carriers to replicate their success.
How has the partnership changed the game?
Telebirr leveraged Huawei’s extensive experience in MobileMoney from other emerging markets. Rather than just offering a simple point-of-sale (POS) transactional service, it started with dozens of new services based on the App, USSD and SMS, including money transfers, cash deposits, remittance, bill payments, cash withdrawal, fundraising, bulk disbursement, ticket purchases, utility services, passport services, digital lotteries, donations, credit loan, microloan, savings services and more.
To accomplish this, telebirr and Huawei had to gain the backing of the regulators who were willing to accept the concept of holding biometric information electronically and registering customers electronically by matching faces and ID cards. This is more reliable than giving the information to a human being. Telebirr has launched new payment services and financial services, on top of the basic wallet. It’s quite an incredible journey to witness this development in one of the most populous countries in North Africa.
Huawei’s Mobile Money platform is built with modularity as its core, including its main products, such as the wallet, finance services, and payment services. In addition, Huawei incorporates enabling technologies for API integration, APP development frameworks and AI Technologies to enable the development of smarter and more secure ecosystems. A key benefit of Huawei’s extensive R&D and software portfolio is the ability to easily obtain and pre-integrate such world-class enabling technologies to accelerate the growth and development of Mobile Money ecosystems.