Everything Is Becoming a Superapp, and Ethiopia Is Racing to Catch Up

Open one app and you can send money, pay electricity bills, buy airtime, take a microloan, and book a taxi without leaving the screen. That is the promise of the superapp, no longer just a Chinese or Southeast Asian story. It has landed firmly in Addis Ababa.

The global superapp market was valued at roughly $121 billion in 2025, with forecasts pointing toward nearly $969 billion by 2033 at a compounding rate near 30 percent annually. One industry report even flags Africa as the fastest-moving region for adoption, thanks to cheap smartphones and expanding networks. Ethiopia sits right at the center of that push.

Telebirr Leads the Pack

Telebirr, the mobile money platform launched by state-run Ethio Telecom in 2021, has become the country's default financial superapp. It closed 2025 with 58.61 million subscriptions, up from 51.5 million at the start of the year, adding 7.29 million new users and moving 2.38 trillion birr in transactions during the 2024/25 fiscal year alone.

Ethio Telecom is not slowing down. Under its new three-year plan through 2028, it wants Telebirr to reach 75 million users, with transaction values climbing toward 21.3 trillion birr annually. The app has already moved past simple transfers into a genuine superapp, rebranded as Telebirr SuperApp, plugging into government services, tax payments, and utility bills through mini apps built by outside developers.

The Bank Getting in on the Action

The Commercial Bank of Ethiopia is not sitting this out either. Its CBE Birr wallet has around 30 million users, while a separate mobile banking app serves closer to 9 to 10 million customers holding actual bank accounts. The bank has since launched its own CBE Superapp branding and a payroll and lending tool called CBE Beje, letting businesses pay staff and issue collateral-free loans up to 150,000 birr straight through the app.

The Real Numbers Behind the Boom

Zoom out and the scale becomes clearer. According to the National Bank of Ethiopia's second National Digital Payments Strategy, mobile money accounts nationwide grew from 12.2 million in 2020 to 139.5 million by 2025, while mobile banking accounts rose from 9.1 million to 54 million. Annual transaction volumes grew at a 146 percent compound rate and values at 161 percent.

But registration is not engagement. The same document admits that of those nearly 140 million accounts, only 15 percent are active. Millions signed up for a wallet and rarely use it beyond one occasional transfer.

The Drawbacks Nobody Advertises

Superapps concentrate enormous value in a single point of failure, and Ethiopia's experience shows what that risk looks like. Digital fraud losses hit 1.3 billion birr in 2024, with 28 of the country's 31 banks reporting a fraud incident. Ethiopia also ranked first globally in malware detections in 2024, per INTERPOL's Africa Cyberthreat Assessment, and banks recorded 4,623 attack attempts in just the first half of that year.

Digital literacy remains a barrier too. The central bank found that 66 percent of women and 60 percent of men lack basic mobile money skills, leaving them vulnerable to SIM swap scams and phishing now common across these platforms. Reliability is another sore point, with roughly 8 percent of transactions failing on technical issues. Regulators have also flagged a troubling gap: when fraud happens, the burden of loss usually falls entirely on the consumer, since responsibility between banks and customers is not clearly defined.

Convenience at a Cost

None of this makes the superapp wave a mistake. Financial inclusion has expanded faster in five years than it did in the previous three decades, and services like microloans, bill payments, and remittances that once required a bank branch visit now take seconds on a phone. Government projections targeting 100 million Ethio Telecom customers and 75 million Telebirr users by 2028 suggest this consolidation will only deepen.

The tension is simple. Convenience and inclusion are real, but so is the exposure that comes with putting money, identity, and daily life inside one app. As Telebirr, CBE Birr, and M-Pesa fight for the same pool of users, the platform that wins will be the one that solves trust, not just the one with the most features.