EthSwitch S.C., Ethiopia’s National Switch, announced the commencement of interoperability of POS Terminals run by banks. The move enables payment card holders’ to purchase goods and services at merchant location using POS Terminals operated by any bank. The announcement came after National Bank of Ethiopia approved the full scale commercialization of POS Purchase service following months of pilot test involving participant banks.
POS Purchase interoperability is a mechanism to enable payment card holders pay for services and merchandise purchased at merchant locations using POS terminals of any bank through the interconnection protocols to authenticate, authorise and clearing of payments facilitated by Ethswitch. Ethswitch CEO, Yilebes Addis stated that “POS Purchase interoperability is significant steps in the modernization of payment system in Ethiopia, which will help banks efficiently utilize their expensive POS Terminals as it avoids the need to place several terminals in certain merchant location and use them in other location.” He also added that “payment card holders will have the convenience of paying with their card in many more merchant locations increasing the trend of using electronic payment methods.” Ethswitch works to make payments simple and affordable so that the significant shares of retail transactions are done using electronic methods.
Ethswitch previously has enabled interoperability of ATMs operated by all commercial banks resulting in millions of transactions worth billions of birr in value every month. In the month of August alone a total of 2.79 million transactions with a total value of 1.82 billion birr have been facilitated. It is to be recalled that Ethswitch has achieved PCI DSS Certification, the highest order of payment industry data security standard.