SantimPay Financial Solutions and Berhan Bank have signed a strategic partnership agreement to deploy low-cost Point-of-Sale (POS) devices to merchants across Ethiopia.
The agreement, signed at Berhan Bank’s headquarters three days ago, positions SantimPay to support the bank in distributing POS devices and onboarding merchants, with the aim of significantly increasing payment acceptance points nationwide.
The collaboration comes as SantimPay gains momentum in Ethiopia’s digital payments sector. In September, the fintech announced a major partnership with global payments company Visa to deploy up to 20,000 POS devices over the next year. Under that arrangement, Visa will cover the upfront hardware cost, allowing SantimPay to offer the terminals to merchants at no charge.
POS adoption in Ethiopia has long remained limited. Commercial banks have historically concentrated deployments in select locations in Addis Ababa, citing high device and maintenance costs. Although the number of terminals has increased slightly in recent years, fewer than 10,000 active devices serve a market of more than 40 million cardholders, meaning most card users still rely primarily on ATMs for cash withdrawals. Increasingly, fintech companies are stepping in to expand POS distribution through new partnership models.
According to the latest figures from Ethiopia’s national switch operator, EthSwitch, 2.78 million interoperable POS transactions worth 7.2 Billion birr were recorded in 2024/25, a 24% increase from the previous year. Despite this progress, acceptance infrastructure remains far below demand.
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