The Commercial Bank of Ethiopia (CBE) has awarded a 16.4 million Br bid for the provision of 2,000 Point of Sale (POS) machines to a local IT vendor SS Communications.
The tender for the supply of the POS machines was floated in February 2015 and opened on March 10, 2015 in the presence of all bidders, according to Ephrem Mekonnen, communications director at the Bank.
A previous bid for the supply and installation of the POS machines was cancelled, because the companies that responded to the tender were unqualified. Seven companies had responded to the first bid in August 2014.
Out of the 25 companies that bought the bid document from the Bank, only four presented an offer for the supply and installation of the POS machines.
The offering companies were SSC, M2M, Tracon Trading and TPS Ltd and only two passed the technical evaluation to proceed to the second level, which is financial evaluation.
CBE, a bank that already had 10,000 POS machines at the time of reporting its nine month performance, had also previously awarded SSC the tender for supply and installation of 4,000 POS machines for 39 million Br through a bid announced in October 2013 and opened in July 2014.
In the past nine months of the fiscal year 2014/15, the Bank’s POS machines had facilitated 228,903 transactions worth 553 million Br. The bank also has 654,641 active electronic cards. The performance also shows that the bank’s total assets reached 276.3 billion Br, while the income of the Bank was 16 billion Br with the profit before tax reaching nine billion Br.
“Our experience on the machines shows that they are gaining popularity and the major aim of having these machines is to create a cashless society,” said Ephrem.
The current POS machines are to be installed in four months, meeting the target for the fiscal year of installing 2,000 POS machines.
M2M, the second company that had passed to the financial evaluation with SSC, had offered 19.4 million Br for the supply of the machines, which was three million Birr higher than that of SSC’s offer.
CBE, which is pioneer in the bringing and installation of Automatic Teller Machines (ATM) and POS machines to the country, currently has 10,000 POS machines and 627 ATM’s. In the first nine months of this fiscal year, transactions using the ATM machines totaled 11.1 million amounting 10 billion Br. In addition to the expansion of its electronic equipment, the Bank is also expanding the number of its branches, now at 939 with 107 branches added in the nine month reporting period.
The POS machines that are to be installed are from Verifon (VX), which is the same brand as the previous 4,000 POS machines supplied to the Bank by SSC.
“[The Machines] comply with the latest global security standards, and take advantage of the latest connectivity options from GPRS, CDMA, and Wi-Fi to IP and Bluetooth-enabled devices,” states the website of SSC in the section that identifies the partners of the company.
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