M-Pesa customers in Ethiopia can now withdraw cash from Bank of Abyssinia ATMs without a card

M-Pesa customers in Ethiopia can now withdraw cash from Bank of Abyssinia ATMs without a bank card. Safaricom Ethiopia, which runs the mobile money service, announced the feature this week. Withdrawals start in the M-Pesa app: a customer selects the withdrawal option, chooses “Withdraw at ATM”, authorises the transaction, completes authentication, and collects the cash from a supported machine. The company says it processes transactions in real time and keeps the service available around the clock.

Bank of Abyssinia is the first bank on the service. Safaricom Ethiopia said the integration will extend to more banks, though it has not named them or given dates. The announcement also did not include withdrawal fees or transaction limits. We have not found a published tariff for the ATM service and will update this piece when one is available.

Why ATMs, in a mobile money market

Cash still handles most day-to-day payments in Ethiopia. Until now, an M-Pesa customer who needed physical cash had two main routes: an M-Pesa agent, or moving money to a bank account first and withdrawing it there. Cardless ATM withdrawals add a third route that works at any hour, without an agent, and without owning a bank card or a bank account at the ATM’s bank.

That last part matters more in Ethiopia than it would in Kenya. As we covered when Safaricom explained its Ethiopia strategy, the company is not solving the money transfer problem it solved in Kenya in 2007. Ethiopia already has around 30 banks and thousands of branches and ATMs. The problem M-Pesa is chasing there is replacing cash payments with digital ones. An ATM bridge works in both directions for that goal: it makes holding money in an M-Pesa wallet less of a commitment, because getting cash back out is easier.

How M-Pesa got here

M-Pesa went live in Ethiopia on 16 August 2023, three months after Safaricom Ethiopia received a Payment Instrument Issuer licence from the National Bank of Ethiopia. The licence, granted in May 2023, was the first mobile money licence Ethiopia issued to a foreign investor, and it followed a change in the law we wrote about back in 2022 that opened payments to foreign companies.

The bigger plumbing arrived in October 2025, when M-Pesa completed its integration with EthSwitch, Ethiopia’s national payment switch. That connection lets M-Pesa customers send money to bank accounts, receive money from bank apps, and pay merchants using bank-issued EthQR codes. It started with 15 banks and wallets. By March 2026, Safaricom said the EthSwitch link connected M-Pesa to more than 30 banks and digital wallets, and reported 5.2 million active M-Pesa users in Ethiopia. The ATM feature is a different kind of integration. EthSwitch moves money between accounts. The Bank of Abyssinia deal dispenses physical cash from a wallet.

The Telebirr gap

M-Pesa remains the smaller player. Telebirr, the mobile money service run by state-owned Ethio Telecom, launched in May 2021 and reported 60.6 million registered users for the financial year that ended in June 2026, with ETB 4.19 trillion processed in the year. M-Pesa’s 5.2 million active users is a fraction of that, though the two figures count differently: Telebirr reports registered users, Safaricom reports active ones. Safaricom Ethiopia passed 10 million total network customers in mid-2025, and its M-Pesa numbers have been growing faster than Telebirr’s in percentage terms, from a much smaller base.

The Kenya comparison

Kenyan readers will recognise this feature. M-Pesa has offered cardless ATM withdrawals in Kenya for years through partner banks. There, a customer generates a withdrawal code on the phone, enters it at the ATM, and collects cash. The Kenyan version charges between KES 35 and KES 203 depending on the amount, with withdrawals from KES 200 up to KES 35,000 per transaction. Ethiopia’s pricing and limits are the open question. Bank of Abyssinia’s own card customers can withdraw up to ETB 10,000 to 50,000 a day from its ATMs depending on card type, but those limits apply to cards, not to M-Pesa withdrawals.

What to watch: which banks join next, and what the withdrawals cost. Safaricom Ethiopia has promised more bank integrations without naming them. If the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia, which has the country’s largest ATM network, joins the service, cardless withdrawals would move from a convenience to something most urban M-Pesa users can reach.