Ethio telecom starts international remittance

After Ethio telecom received a green light from the National Bank of Ethiopia to start international remittance through its mobile money platform Telebirr which is gaining a large number of customers, the sole telecom operator launched its service as of yesterday Saturday, November 20.
Ethio telecom during the last couple of weeks was integrating its system with its international partners and conducted various testing of the system.
Ethio telecom announced that you can then either go to the nearest telebirr agent and receive your cash or transfer it to your bank account.
With telebirr International Remittance Service customers can receive remittance from most parts of the world including the US, Canada and Australia.
The telecom giant also announced that a 5% e-money bonus will be available on every remittance value received. It also said that the maximum daily cash out limit for customers who received remittance is for level 1, is 5,000 birr whilst for levels 2 and 3 customers is at 50,000 birr.
It also announced that both registered telebirr users and unregistered mobile users can receive international remittance.
Currently, there are 11 million and growing subscribers of telebirr with over Two billion birr being transacted through telebirr. So far, 26,442 agents have been providing telebirr services across the country with 9 banks being integrated with the platform.
It is to be recalled that, the telecommunications CEO said that the new service, telebirr, will mark a shift for Ethiopia, where the banking system is seen as inefficient with 19 commercial banks serving a population of about 115 million. To this end, within the coming five years about 50 percent of the total Ethiopian economy or 3.5 trillion birr in transaction is expected to go through telebirr.
Telebirr is a mobile money service developed by Huawei. It took five months for Huawei to develop the end-to-end service which facilitates the delivery of cashless transactions. The platform deployed currently has the capacity of processing up to 100 transactions per second (TPS) and can be scaled up to 1000 TPS in the future according to Huawei. The service is accessible via SMS, USSD, and smartphone applications. Telebirr for ease of usability also works in five languages.