Abay Bank is introducing a new way people can save money to help others. The bank which opened its doors around a decade ago, has introduced a charitable savings account designed to serve humanitarian organizations.
This charitable saving account is a premium interest bearing saving account designed to raise funds from money deposited by people who want to donate or governmental and non-governmental organizations interested in supporting charity organizations from the interest earned in their bank accounts, according to Abay Bank’s statement.
“The donating customer can be any individual or organization including bank customers who want to donate to charitable organizations,” the bank’s statement added.

It stated that charity organizations are a donation receiving customer and can also open the account for themselves.
According to the new scheme, the bank will give the organization a prevailing default saving interest rate in addition to one percent per year, computed based on the minimum deposit balance in the account.
A minimum deposit of 60,000 birr and 100 thousand birr is required for individual and collective organizations respectively in order to get the premium interest rate.
The bank has 4,080 shareholders and a paid up capital of 1.33 billion birr as of last June. Abay now has 162 branches, and close to half a million customers. At the same time their deposit mobilization has reached 9.6 billion birr.
In the past budget year, the bank has secured 419 million birr, and their earnings per share was 284 birr as of their last report.