Odit.et
Track your money from the SMS your bank already sends you.
Odit reads the transaction SMS from CBE, telebirr, Awash, Dashen, BOA and 16 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.
Your bank already tells you everything. Odit keeps the record.
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.
What you get from it
- Every account in one place
- Balances and transactions from every bank and wallet that sends you messages, side by side, instead of six apps.
- Who you actually pay
- Transfers keep the name on the other side, so your history is people and merchants, not account numbers.
- Told the moment it happens
- An arriving message is matched on the phone in about a tenth of a second, so the notification is the transaction, not the raw SMS.
- Bills you keep forgetting
- Repeating payments are spotted from what you have already paid, and you are told before the next one is due.
Providers Odit reads
26 of them. Each writes its messages differently, so each has its own set of parsers, kept current as the formats change.
Banks (17)
- Commercial Bank of Ethiopia
- Bank of Abyssinia
- Zemen Bank
- Awash Bank
- Dashen Bank
- Enat Bank
- Amhara Bank
- Nib Bank
- Berhan Bank
- Hibret Bank
- Ahadu Bank
- Hijra Bank
- Cooperative Bank of Oromia
- Oromia Bank
- Abay Bank
- Wegagen Bank
- ZamZam Bank
Mobile wallets (7)
- Telebirr
- Safaricom M-PESA
- CBE Birr
- Apollo
- COOPay Ebirr
- Kaafi Ebirr
- HalalPay
A 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.
Questions people ask
- What if my bank is not on the list?
- Its messages stay on your phone. Odit only uploads and reads messages from senders it recognises, so an unsupported bank is simply left alone. The list does grow, one provider at a time, as their message formats are worked through: Abay Bank was the twenty-first. If yours is missing, shake your phone inside the app to send a report.
- Does Odit need my bank password or my card details?
- No. Odit never asks for a password, a PIN, a card number or access to your bank account. It reads the transaction alerts your bank already sends you as SMS, which is information you have been given, not access you are granting.
- Where do my messages go?
- Transaction messages from recognised bank and wallet senders are uploaded to your own account so the app can build your history across devices. Everything else stays on your phone. You can exclude specific senders, and you can delete your account and its data from Settings.
- Does it work without a data connection?
- Reading a new message does. The app matches an arriving SMS on the device and shows you the transaction straight away, then uploads it when there is a connection. That matters here, because bank SMS arrives whether or not mobile data is on.
- How much does Odit cost?
- It is free on Google Play. There is no paid tier today.
- Is there an iPhone app?
- No. iOS does not let an app read SMS, so the approach Odit uses is not possible there. There is a macOS companion that reads messages synced through iMessage, and the web app at odit.et shows your data on any device once your Android phone has synced it.
From the engineering log
All postsHow the parts of this work, and what broke on the way, written up as it happened.
Get it on your phone
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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