Somalia’s Premier Bank to bring ATMs, debit cards to Mogadishu

Thursday, April 23, 2015

Somalia’s Premier Bank has struck a deal with Mastercard and will issue debit cards and install ATM machines in the capital of the war-ravaged country, the Islamic lender’s top executive said on Wednesday.

The east African nation has struggled for more than two decades with civil war and containing an insurrection by Islamist militants which has meant even basic infrastructure has been beyond most of the country’s 10 million people.

Yet with al Shabaab militants driven out of the capital Mogadishu and other major strongholds, business and consumer demand has grown for services which would be taken for granted in many other parts of the world, including banking.

“Somalia is a very under-penetrated market with less than 3 percent of its population banked,” Mahat Mohamed Ahmed, managing director of Premier Bank, which received a licence from the central bank last year, told Reuters in Dubai.

Source: Reuters (link opens in a new window)

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digital payments, financial inclusion