A complete digital bank to be opened by FY24: Kamal

The government has planned to launch the country's first ever full-fledged digital bank within the next fiscal year (FY'24), finance minister AHM Mustafa Kamal said in his budget speech in parliament on Thursday.

He said a Bangladesh Bank committee was working on devising strategies to broaden and accelerate financial inclusion effort. The committee's work on formulating the outline is completed by now, he added.

"In FY2023-24, we hope to be able to launch a digital bank," said the minister.

At the same time, he said, the BB is developing a machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI)-based credit rating system.

"With these, it will be much easier to spot fake and anonymous borrowers and simultaneously it will be considerably simpler for genuine borrowers to obtain loans," he added.

Earlier on May 24, BB Governor Abdur Rouf Talukder while inaugurating a digital summit dropped a hint of launching such a digital bank in the country.

There are a total of 61 commercial banks operating in the country but none of them are fully digital, and require a huge volume of investment for automation.

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