The Commercial Bank of Ethiopia (CBE) has introduced a new verification feature on its mobile banking platform.
The bank hopes the addition of a receipt verification tool, which now only works on Android smartphones, helps address ongoing issues reported by merchants and customers.
Only a few months ago, several concerning videos began circulating showing frustrated merchants complaining that they had unknowingly accepted fake transaction receipts when conducting mobile payments.
The merchants described situations where customers would show a receipt on their mobile banking app as proof of payment, but later the transaction would be found to not be valid or have gone through at all. This left the merchants unhappy as they had already provided goods or services without actually being paid.
The lack of an easy verification process meant merchants had no foolproof way to confirm charges were real before handing over products. This understandably eroded trust in using mobile banking for business sales and collections.
Clearly seeing the need to restore confidence, CBE moved quickly to design and deploy a receipt verification feature within its popular banking app. The new tool will permit merchants to simply enter or scan a transaction code from any receipt and instantly check if the payment was legitimately processed.
It is hoped that enabling straightforward receipt authentication will help address the fake transaction complaints that had been causing frustration.
Experts believe the solution will go far in supporting the continued growth of e-commerce in Ethiopia, which presently relies heavily on cash-on-delivery since online payments have not been widely adopted yet.