OPPORTUNITY AND CHALLENGES OF ADOPTING AGENT BANKING

Commercial bank of Ethiopia (CBE) are adopting agency banking service. The services start throughout the country as a strategic tool to increasing outreach customers with significant amount of investment.The general objective of the study was identifying opportunities and challenges of adoption agent banking in commercial bank of Ethiopia in case bahirdar district. From this general objective, three specific issues were explored: -current practices of agent banking service, opportunities of agent bank adoption and challenges for the adoption of agent banking service in commercial bank of Ethiopia bahirdar district. Descriptive survey design was employed to conduct this study. Both primary and secondary data were collected for the purpose of this study from the bank staff, agents, branch managers and bank web sites respectively. The collected data was analyzed by using descriptive analysis such as tables, frequency and percentages. From analysis of the collected data, the findingsrevealed that: commercial bank of Ethiopia practice various agent banking service that are providing to the customer, agent banking provide various opportunities for the adoption of the system to bank, agent and customer respectively. Customer poor response to register new, Lack of trust with bank agents, Fraud and Money Laundering, Liquidity management, Not Provide loan to agent as source of startup capital banking, Quality of agent to provide agent banking service to customer, Customer awareness and literacy, training to agents and bank staff, Mobile network availability are the major challenges for the adoption of agent -banking service in commercial bank of Ethiopia bahirdar district. The study recommended that commercial bank of Ethiopia should be focus agent banking expansion on rural area, provide adequate training, focus on awareness creation, improve mobile network availability and assist agent float.