AliExpress Arrives, Telebirr Thrives 🌍

Welcome to this week’s edition of ፍራንክ Digest!

Your weekly brief on all things Finance and Investing. Quick, enjoyable reads for busy professionals in 5 minutes or less.

Topics this week:

• ⚡ BUZZ: ‘My VISA’, Telebirr’s latest move to collect Dollars

• 🛒 BABA Fever: AliExpress hopes to remedy Ethiopia’s eCommerce headache

• ☔ Beyond Car Insurance: Meet Ethiopia’s underrated policies

• 🗝️ The Key Takeaways

Thanks for reading!

BUZZ: All Aboard the VISA Train as Telebirr Introduces its Own Virtual Card

If there was an annual review of the 5 new words added to the Amharic dictionary, ‘ቴሌብር’ would be top of that list.

As its popularity grows, Telebirr has been stretching its arms across the land and now, seemingly, beyond!

The fintech wing of Ethio Telecom recently introduced its latest feature: My VISA, a virtual bank card that is connected to your Telebirr’s wallet.

The feat was made possible through a partnership with the VISA Direct platform.

On the surface, it’s an opportunity to showcase Telebirr’s growing influence into financial services - in this case facilitating payments with a card (more on this below as we look into eCommerce transactions with the imminent arrival of AliExpress 🛒)

We wrote a few months ago that Telebirr was looking more and more like a bank killer. Well this new development seems to support our theory: wallets are basically checking accounts, loans are easily requested with one tap on the app and now you have your own dedicated bank card.

There’s an old age expression:

If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck

Bank 🏦 = Duck 🦆 

Duck 🦆 = Telebirr 📱

Telebirr 📱 = Bank 🏦  

You get the point…duck.

While innovation is key to economic growth, we need to look below the surface: Tele is banking (pun intended) on Ethiopian expats to load up their USDs and EUROs and what nots onto a separate app called ‘telebirr Remit’.

From then on, they can send to their local counterparts onto their Telebirr wallets.

This looks more like a collection plate for foreign currency, a tactic that’s all too familiar in the end.

Is this bad? Not at all but the intention might seem misleading.

With the FX rate now in close parity with the parallel market, moves like these can boost remittances and bolster the currency reserve that’s always hungry for more.