Mater card in addis ababa

Dashen Bank has won a membership license from MasterCard, will be distributing MasterCard and branded payment cards to its clients shortly. It is to be recalled that Dashen bank had launched Visa card service 18 months ago. “We can not specify the exact day when this new service (MasterCard) will start,” Ibrahim Dawd, Payment Card Manager at Dashen Bank told Capital.MasterCard is based in the USA and has more than one hundred million clients world wide. It has forty years of experience in banking and 30 per cent market share in the world. MasterCard is one of the major credit cards used regularly by people in the United States, second only in name recognition and worldwide billings to Visa, according to information from MasterCard website. By marketing itself to ordinary men and women, in contrast to Visa’s efforts to capture an upper-income clientele, MasterCard is slowly chipping away at Visa’s market share in both the United States and other areas around the globe. In related news, Dashen bank is to apply for a license from the National Bank of Ethiopia to provide a debit card service for clients who travel abroad. According to Ibrahim, the bank is completing preparations to provide the service. “We are awaiting the acceptance of our application from the National Bank to start this service. At present we give Visa Card service only domestically.” Ato Ibrahim said, “We will start a credit card service to our customers that enables them to borrow money from their bank’s deposit with financial and time limits.” Currently Dashen bank gives debit service only on Visa card; on this service clients can get up to 3,000 birr in cash and can buy goods and services of up to 5,000 birr a day. The bank has 13 thousand visa card users in the country. Dashen bank gives ATM service only at 10 Addis Ababa branches and one in Awassa. Currently the bank is making preparations to distribute ten Automatic Teller Machines (ATM) to its branches and is in the process of importing other 20 machines. According to Dashen Bank’s annual report, in the last fiscal year the bank earned 188 million birr (21 million USD) in net profits.