Commercial Bank of Ethiopia Will begin providing ATM machines

The Commercial Bank of Ethiopia (CBE) awarded the project to acquire card based payment system to M2M Group, a Morocco based company. The contract agreement between the two was finally signed on March 20, 17 months after the tender was floated.
Sources within CBE told Capital, the project that entails supply of the hardware and installation is worth close to 4.5 million Euros including training by the contracted to the bank’s officials. The hardware components include 50 Automated Teller Machines (ATMs), 250 Point of Sale Terminals (POS), hardware for Card Production, Servers to support the switching and card management software.
The significant achievement of this project shall be implementation of a Visa Card system, which allows the bank to issue Visa branded Cards as well as accept such cards from users visiting the country.
CBE has had Visa membership since November 14, 2005; however, due to lack of appropriate infrastructure it failed to reap the fruit of its membership.
Despite being the pioneer in introducing ATM based payment system (as of 2001) in the country with its fleet of eight ATMs located in Addis Ababa, the bank lagged behind most of the private banks, especially Dashen Bank, which worked aggressively to maintain its lead in electronic payment systems.
The success of this project will increase the bank’s foreign currency income through the service it will provide to foreign visitors with Visa branded cards.
The availability of the terminals in the different areas (first in Addis Ababa with 250 POS terminals planned to be deployed in the initial phase) will help increase the awareness of the population towards electronic payment systems.
The bank has spent over seven months negotiating with the final short listed bidders – Xiamen Longtop from China, Technology Associates from Kenya and the winner M2M Group of Morocco. This last contract negotiation between CBE and M2M took three full days.
The award winning company, M2M Group of Morocco (which has implemented similar projects for different banks including BNP Paris bas and Algeria Post), locally represented by Motti Engineering Plc, signed the final contract.

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