Odit.et
Odit reads the transaction SMS from CBE, telebirr, Awash, Dashen, BOA and 35 more Ethiopian banks and wallets, and keeps them as one running record of your money. You never download a statement or hand a password to anybody.
There is no open banking API in Ethiopia. What there is, on every phone, is a stream of transaction SMS: a deposit from CBE, a transfer on telebirr, a card purchase at Dashen. Each one carries an amount, a balance and a name.
Those messages are already yours. They just sit in an inbox in a thousand shapes, next to your OTP codes and your promotions. Odit reads them and turns the pile into a record.
Install the Android app, give it access to your messages once, and it does the rest. No statement to download, and no password handed to anybody.
40 of them. Each writes its messages differently, so each has its own set of parsers, kept current as the formats change.
Commercial Bank of EthiopiaBank of AbyssiniaZemen BankAwash BankDashen BankEnat BankAmhara BankNib BankBerhan BankHibret BankAhadu BankHijra BankCooperative Bank of OromiaOromia BankAbay BankWegagen BankZamZam BankTsehay BankBunna BankSiinqee BankAnbesa Bank (formerly Lion International Bank)Tsedey BankGlobal Bank EthiopiaGadaa BankAddis Bank (formerly Addis International Bank)Siket BankGoh Betoch BankRammis BankSidama BankOmo BankShabelle BankTelebirrSafaricom M-PESACBE BirrApolloCOOPay EbirrKaafi EbirrHalalPayGreyBinanceA wallet holds its own balance even when its bank is on the list too, so CBE Birr is kept apart from CBE, and COOPay from Coopbank.
I started Odit in February 2025 to see where my own money went, and for a while I was the only one using it.
40banks and wallets
A page on my laptop that read an export of my SMS inbox and pulled the amount, fee and balance out of each telebirr message.
I started the phone app so the messages could come straight from the inbox instead of an export file.
I put up a sign-up form, and 69 people filled it in over the first three days.
Your year in money, built from your own messages. It was the first page people outside the early access list could open.
I moved the website and the server into one repository, the one Odit still runs from.
I switched off the invite list on New Year's Day, so anyone with an account could get in.
Before this you installed an APK from this site and the app updated itself.
Odit had read a million bank and wallet messages into transactions.
The site you're reading now, rebuilt in Next.js.
October was the first month more than 1,000 people made an account.
Four months after the first million.
How the parts of this work, and what broke on the way, written up as it happened.
Odit is a free Android app. Download it from Google Play, sign in with Google, and your history builds itself from the messages already on your phone. You can then read it on any device at odit.et/home.
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