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ADB for updating mobile payment ecosystem

Syful Islam | October 25, 2018 00:00:00


The Asian Development Bank (ADB) suggested upgrading the system infrastructure for enhanced mobile payment usage in Bangladesh.

This will help the country move towards a cashless society, it said.

The Manila-based lender recently fielded a mission to this end in Bangladesh.

It found a significant uptake in the usage of mobile payments here.

The ADB said there is still room for further growth in the mobile financial transaction system.

In Bangladesh, it said, mobile payment accounts for 18 per cent of the total payments.

India makes such payments 41 per cent, China 69 per cent and Kenya 93 per cent.

"The usage of mobile payment in Bangladesh is still predominately person to person transfer," the ADB said.

"We see great potential to expand use cases to promote e-commerce, small merchants/SME, remittance and potentially demonetisation or move towards cashless society," it said in an aide-memoire.

The ADB mission noted significant progress made by the central bank in building state-of-art mobile payment ecosystem.

It found some areas where the Bangladesh Bank (BB) needs to work on, either to provide more support for "today's need or to accommodate future growth".

The ADB team identified some medium-term infrastructure upgrade needs.

They include wholesale or interbank infrastructure layer, national retail payment infrastructure layer, shared delivery layer, shared delivery device layer, and digital enablement support systems.

It suggested upgrading national payment system, real-time payment system, creating remittance hub for Bangladesh, e-commerce/payment gateway solution and enhancement of national savings system.

It also recommended building retail delivery centre of excellence, implementation of mobile financial system interoperability, data warehousing and analytical big data mining and digital ID system.

There are some 64.69 million registered clients in mobile financial services (MFS) as of August this year, according to the BB data.

Of them, around 30 million accounts are active.

In August, some 190 million transactions involving Tk 343 billion were made, with 6.30 million daily transactions on average.

In the same month, some Tk 317 million came as remittance which was transferred using mobile financial services.

Salary disbursement, utility bill payment, merchant payment and various government payments are also being held through mobile services.

A senior official of finance ministry said on Wednesday scope is there to further expand mobile financial services, providing necessary infrastructure upgrade.

The ministry is working with the ADB in this regard to reduce paper-based transactions as much as possible, he told the FE.

"We also have plans to expand mobile payments in microfinance and insurance sectors," he said.

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