CBE Drove Almost All of Last Week's Birr Move and Closed Its Gap to the Reference Rate

The Commercial Bank of Ethiopia held its buying rate at 160.23 birr through Wednesday last week and then raised it by 20 cents on each of Thursday, Friday and Saturday, ending the week at 160.83 birr buying and 164.04 birr selling.

One bank, most of the move

That 0.37 percent rise was more than six times the increase at Nib Bank, the next largest mover, and CBE alone accounted for 57.3 percent of the week's increase in the average buying quotation across the market, Addis Fortune reports.

The more telling number is the gap. CBE had been buying dollars at a discount to the National Bank's reference rate; over the week that discount narrowed from 0.75 birr to 0.09 birr, a compression of almost 88 percent. The reference itself barely moved, easing from 160.98 birr to 160.92 birr.

What it means for anyone buying dollars

A state bank that holds the largest share of deposits and of foreign-currency business can move the market average on its own, and last week it did. The direction is convergence: CBE is no longer the cheap bid in the market relative to the reference rate, which removes part of the spread between the official anchor and what the biggest bank will actually pay an exporter.

The market average, meanwhile, went the other way. The average buying premium over the reference widened from about 0.53 percent to 0.59 percent — so while CBE closed its discount, the rest of the market edged further above the anchor. An exporter shopping rates is therefore looking at a narrower, not a wider, dispersion at the top, and a reference rate that is no longer the ceiling for most of the banks quoting against it.

Open

Addis Fortune's figures do not say what drove CBE's three consecutive increases — whether it was deliberate alignment with the reference rate, competition for exporter inflows, or a response to volume. The National Bank has not commented on the convergence. Nor is there published data on the volumes transacted at these rates, without which a quoted rate tells you what a bank advertises rather than what it buys.

Sources: Addis Fortune, 21 October 2026