Digital economy will make transactions faster, reliable

Experts tell ICAB webinar

FE Team | Published: March 11, 2022 22:49:26

Experts at a webinar on Thursday said digital economy will make transactions faster and reliable and also reduce cost of doing business, reports BSS.
If all economic activities are digitized, transaction will be faster and reliable and cost of doing business will come down. Besides, Informal and hidden economy would be transformed into formal one while gray and black economy turn into transparent one, they said.
The webinar on 'Economics of Digital Payment System for Growth: Comparative Practices and the Bangladesh Narratives' was organised by the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Bangladesh (ICAB), said a press release.
Post, Telecommunication and Information Technology minister Mustafa Jabbar joined the event as the chief guest.
The speakers said Bangladesh is now evolving with enormous economic potentialities. It has maintained an average growth rate of 8.0 per cent over the last few years. This is because the economy has been turning in to industrialised digital economy where everything is connected digitally.
The traditional revenue collection, banking and payment system-all components of a country's economic machine -- are now transforming into digitally operations, they added.
Experts in these areas claim that digitizing revenue collection and expenditure payment with a real time settlement would help increase revenue, reduce transaction cost and other costs, and raise annual revenue four times minimum from the analog and paper-based collection system.
ICAB President Shahadat Hossain delivered the address of welcome. Professor Mustafizur Rahman, Distinguished Fellow, Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD), and Khondkar Atique-e-Rabbani, Member-ICAB & Managing Director, The Computers Ltd, joined the webinar as panel speakers.
ICAB Past President A K Gulam Kibria was the session chairman while Dr Jamaluddin Ahmed, Past President of ICAB, presented the keynote paper.
ICAB President Shahadat Hossain said the contribution of the IT industry to the ongoing economic growth of Bangladesh is getting bigger day by day.
He said Bangladesh has made significant progress in the digital economy in the last four years and has made it to the list of 'Top Movers' of 2019. Three other countries on the list are Ukraine, South Africa and Algeria. This list has been prepared through assessment of the progress of the world in digital economy from 2015 to 2019.
Keynote speaker Dr Jamaluddin Ahmed in his paper said adoption of digital technology causes the changes to economic behaviour and the cost of doing business is on the decline as digital technology evolves in processing and running billions of economic transactions.
The payment system of a country entails the transfer of value from one to the other economic agent. As the economic activity grew following agriculture and industrial advances, increasing payments needed to be made over greater distances, and so both volumes and values of interbank obligations increased, he said.
ICAB Vice President NKA Mobin delivered the concluding remarks.