Banks Would Pay 10 Birr a Name Check, and They Want the Price Locked

FaydaVerse's proposed tariff runs to 11 tiers and charges per identity check, including failed ones. It arrives as bank expenses eat 81.3pc of income, and the banks want the price fixed for two to three years.

A bill requiring banks to verify customers against Fayda, Ethiopia's national digital ID, arrives with a price list attached — and the banks have read it closely enough to object to the structure, not just the number.

The tariff

FaydaVerse's proposed pricing runs to four categories and 11 tiers, and it rewards volume rather than penalising it. A bank pulling records for one million or more customers would pay 10 Br per record. A bank making 100,000 inquiries or fewer would pay double that. Biometric authentication costs more: 20 Br a person above one million a month, and twice that below 100,000.

Three contract terms are doing more work than the headline rate. Banks would be barred from passing the cost to customers. They would pay for failed attempts as well as successful ones. And FaydaVerse would be free to raise or withdraw the fee at any time.

Why the timing stings

Addis Fortune puts the charge against a cost base that is already moving the wrong way. Total bank expenses rose 91.9pc to 525.7 billion Br in 2024/25 and consumed 81.3pc of income, up from 75.8pc the year before. A per-check fee applied across as many as two million requests a day lands on margins that are narrowing without it.

The structural objection

Aminu Nuru, a financial analyst based in Doha, argues the model is wrong rather than merely expensive. Charging for a name and an age treats basic identity verification as a revenue stream when it is a government function; FaydaVerse, on his reading, would do better to price information that adds value — credit scores, fraud history — and give away the rest.

The banks' own ask is narrower and more practical: a price fixed for two to three years, benchmarked internationally, and open to regulatory review rather than unilateral revision.

Open

Whether the verification bill has cleared parliament, when the tariff would take effect, and whether the National Bank of Ethiopia intends to sit between FaydaVerse and the banks on pricing. None of the three has been answered publicly.

Sources: Addis Fortune, 1 October 2026, Addis Fortune, 30 September 2026