Written by 10:11 pm Perspectives, Technology & Digitalization • One Comment

Tele Birr Opens New Opportunities for Growth-Time to Shape the Business Mindset

Slowly yet surely, innovation(digital) is taking ground in the Ethiopian market for real. Over the years, reliable and easily accessible payment option has been one of the real bottlenecks to translate innovation in to value especially for digital products and services. tele birr is here now as a real opportunity at Ethiopian youth’s disposal.

The business environment has been in clear lack of innovations over the years due to the fact that there were not sufficient incentives to do so in the market place. As witnessed in neighboring countries, mobile money applications such as tele birr are real recipes for financial inclusion particularly to the rural mass of the Ethiopian population who would not otherwise be connected to any financial instruments for many years to come. As the financial inclusion fosters across the country as the result of the application of tele birr, increased and new demands emerge for products and services.

With an innovative business mindset anchoring on solutions for existing and emerging problems of the society, the growing young population shall seize this opportunity further supporting and revitalizing the business environment creating more jobs and paying for itself. In fact, my biggest hope is that the youth will refocus on the things that matter in life than the usual ongoing less useful discourse of senseless politics. 

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For example, a time has come for anyone living in cities and urban areas, even diasporas,  to pay for the monthly electricity bills of Pay As You Go systems to support families and relatives in the off-grid areas if rural households cannot pay for their own electricity usage at all. Access to energy(SDG7) goals being served as a result. Similar business models can also be expanded to other productive sectors such as agriculture to spread the upfront costs of productive use equipment over many periods creating opportunities to try new economic activities and improve overall production leveraging the more reliable mobile money installments.Ethio telecom will enable more than 44 million customers to deposit, withdraw and transfer money using an app and a USSD code. To access the service, customers can just dial *127# and has a capacity of processing 100 transactions in a second,  addisfortune reported.

There is no doubt that the competition for similar payment platforms will soar in the months and years ahead which by itself will drive further innovation until the market settles with few winners. While tele birr still presents collaboration opportunities among banks, I think, it is time for Ethiopian Banks and similar mobile  money providers to buckle up and try new innovations as well. Luckily, they  are saved by introduction of only local counterparts for now.

The next phase of competition, as foreign counterparts are allowed to operate in the mobile money space, will further erode the related often static and unreliable services(hence revenue) unless matched by competitive action from their end. If there is any bigger cost associated with mobile money in Ethiopia, as much as other development interventions, it is the cost of not having an effective and reachable one thus far. While ethiotelecom, the current sole telecom operator in Ethiopia, expands its own fortune (potentially monopoly) and mark a new chapter to Ethiopian market place in general through tele birr, the next big innovation we all anticipate will be payment gateway to trade products and services out of Ethiopian border.  

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