EthSwitch Facilitates Over 92 Billion Birr in Interoperable Transactions

EthSwitch, Ethiopia’s national switch operator mandated to create interoperability between financial institutions, has reported facilitating interoperable transactions amounting to 92.4 billion birr in the 2022–23 fiscal year.

The majority of these transactions, totaling 71.4 million, were interoperable ATM transactions, representing a sum of 89.7 billion birr. This reflects an increase of 79 percent compared to the previous year. In terms of point-of-sale (POS) transactions, EthSwitch recorded a total of 970,434 interoperable POS transactions, totaling 2.6 billion birr.

Additionally, peer-to-peer (P2P) transfer services, including account-to-account, account-to-wallet, wallet-to-wallet, and wallet-to-account, amounted to 14.1 million tranactions, indicating a growth of 584 percent compared to the previous year.

EthSwitch, owned by the National Bank of Ethiopia (NBE), financial institutions, and digital financial services providers, also made strides in other areas in the last fiscal year. Solomon Desta, Board Chairperson of EthSwitch and Vice Governor of NBE, highlighted key achievements, stating, “The National Payment Gateway received pilot authorization from the National Bank of Ethiopia, and the pilot phase has commenced. The Instant Payment System and Shared Wallet System are in the final stage of the [User Acceptance Testing] UAT process.”

“The Shared Reconciliation project, a multi-tenant platform designed to enhance operational excellence in the day-to-day reconciliation process, has been launched and moved to a production environment for EthSwitch’s use,” Solomon added.

Looking ahead to the next fiscal year, EthSwitch aims to focus on providing quality services, enhancing existing infrastructure, completing ongoing projects, and strengthening international and regional (cross-border) payment collaborations.