BPO starts mobile money order operation today

FE Team | Published: May 05, 2010 00:00:00 | Updated: February 01, 2018 00:00:00

Sonia H Moni
Bangladesh Post Office (BPO) starts operation of its Mobile Money Order, an electronic money transfer service for the people, on Wednesday.
M Mobasherur Rahman, Director General of BangladeshPost Office (BPO). Said although Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina inaugurated the electronic services on March 26 the service could launched in time for some technical problems.
"From Wednessday we will provide the Mobile Money Order service in 104 post offices in districts, some important upazilas and sub post offices. We have a target to provide this dervice to 650 post offices by June next."
"We have introduced this service for the poor workers, who have migrated to cities and towns for jobs, facing difficulties to remit money to their family members."
BPO DG said: "Speedy money transfer is the demand of time. Now any people can send money through this mobile based money transfer service within two minitues. Whereas in manual system it takes upto seven days."
"Under the system, the post offices will charge Tk 20 for transfer of first Tk 1,000 and Tk 10 for each of the next Tk 1,000. Besides, Tk 7.0 will be charged as electronic cost. Any one can remit maximum Tk10,000 at a time."
"In the first phase, this service will be available only for local people, but within a few months we will also lauch international remitence transfer service, and we are communicating with banks on this issue," he said.
"We have already placed one mobile phone, a computer, UPS and generator in each of the 104 post offices where trained people will operate the service.
To avail of the service, a sender will be required to fill in a form mentioning his or her name, address and the mobile phone number and also the name and address of the recipient.
The money order issuer post office will send the data to the central server, which will in turn send an automatically-generated personal identification number (PIN) through a short message service (SMS) to the mobile phone of the sender.
The sender then will communicate the PIN number to the recipient, as a secret code for the recipient is a must before making any attempt to withdraw money from his or her nearby post office, said the BPO DG.