A smarter way to pay

You are in the grocery store standing in a queue for almost half an hour when your turn finally comes and you hastily move forward to take out the umpteenth item from your cart onto the counter. The cashier quickly scans the barcode on the items as you put it on the counter and gives you the total amount to pay. You hurriedly rummage through your bag for that last 3tk change to be paid, which is nowhere to be found and you notice getting annoyed looks from the people behind you added with a restless cashier at the counter.
Someone who has ever made payments standing in long queues in restaurants, shopping malls, movie theatres or superstores has surely faced a similar situation at least once in their lifetime. And owing to our growing population, these payment queues are becoming longer every day. While credit and debit cards for payments are being used increasingly but due to its inaccessibility at a mass level, cash is undoubtedly still the number one medium of transaction. However, what are being progressively accessible to the general population are the mobile phones in their hands. Currently in Bangladesh there are around 14 crore mobile phone users among which 40 million are smartphone users and this number is on an increasing trend.
Simultaneously with this escalating penetration of mobile phones, there has been a rise of the mobile financial services industry for the last six years, providing some basic services such as money transfer, airtime, interest and payment in limited number of shops.
However, availing services through the current product is still not as popular or convenient for all segments of customers. One of the primary reasons being its dependence on its access channel of USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Service Data). USSD is a session-oriented channel, so it takes multiple steps to carry out a single transaction wasting a user's valuable time. It is also unable to store messages, needing a push SMS for confirmation of transactions and has poor aesthetics making USSD channel increasingly outdated.
When it comes to revolutionising the MFS industry, countries like USA, China and India are at the forefront with service providers such as Applepay, Alipay, WeChat pay and Paytm. These service providers use mobile applications which not only make the service user-friendly by many times but also help to make a grand pathway towards a greater variety of services.
With a mobile app, transactions can be completed through fewer and simpler steps and its history can be readily viewed for better financial management. Bank integration, another important service can be brought in, to pull funds from one's bank account sitting at home instead of physically making a "Cash-In" at an agent point.
Apart from these services, having an app can do wonders in the payment industry. Applepay helps its customer to make incredibly easy and secure contactless payments through the NFC (Near Field Communication) technology where the customers just need to hold the phone on top of the NFC reader and authenticate the transaction with a fingerprint and voila the payment is made!
A similar and less expensive technology used by Alipay, WeChat pay and Paytm is the use of QR codes. The customer will have to open the app and scan the QR code presented in the respective merchant's shop which generates all the payment information on customer's app against which the customer then has to authenticate the payment with a PIN code.
The mobile wallets have reached every corner of China and India. The mobile financial services (MFS), with bKash being a market leader, can take these shining examples to explore such access channel to make good use of the potential market and elevate Bangladesh to the global standard.

Md. Shazzad Hosain is the Chairman of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), North South University.
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