Another day, another mobile money initiative in Africa in an ever changing landscape. Today Ethiopians have been given access to mobile financial services through the HelloCash mobile money platform, an interoperable mobile money service.

The pilot has been launched in three parts of Ethiopia with locations consisting a mix of agent outlets and branches. The HelloCash service enable existing and potential customers of Lion International Bank and Somali Micro Finance to carry out transactions in four key areas of financial transactions: Deposit, Withdraw, Transfer and make payments.

This mobile money services key differentiation is it’s interoperability and shared infrastructure features. The system is designed for multi banks and MFI’s to be interconnected and offer the mobile money services to their respective customers, therefore, partnering financial institutions are able to share each other’s agent and branch network to serve each other’s customers.

This enables any customers of any partnering bank to visit any agent or branches to conduct financial services regardless of which bank customers belongs too. The sharing of agent network allow partnering banks to optimize their investment as well as increase national wide service coverage.

CEO of BelCash International, Mr. Mountaga Vince Diop explained to Appsafrica.com that this is only the beginning of what seems to be an irreversible step to reinforce Financial Inclusion in the country. The Financial Institutions providing HelloCash in Ethiopia plan to build a unique network of more than 20.000 agents across all Ethiopia within the 3 coming years. Watch this space.