BTRC moves to craft mobile banking policy guideline

The country's telecom regulator has moved to formulate a new policy guideline to make the rapidly growing transactions through mobile banking more secured and transparent.

The Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) formed two separate committees in this regard after instructions from the Bangladesh Bank (BB), sources said.

Recently, the BTRC officials sat with the BB officials and later with the mobile phone operators in the policy making issue to build a secure mobile banking system that got already enormous popularity among people due to its flexible nature of money transaction.

The central bank asked the BTRC to be cautious of SIM card replacement and registration issue because mobile banking is totally based on SIM cards. The BB also asked to ensure KYC (know your customers) of mobile phone users.

Earlier, around Tk 2.0 million was hacked from the 30 bank accounts of the Brac Bank due to poor internet security system of the bank, according to the report of Financial Integrity and Customer Services Department (FICSD) of BB recently.

According to BB recommendations, the mobile phone operators will have to take liabilities of financial loss of mobile banking subscribers for the re-issuance or replacement of their SIM cards.

Mobile Financial Services (MFS) witnessed strong growth in the country reaching a customer base of around 13.18 million till December 2013.

Person to person money transfer- `Cash in` and `Cash out`- are the most popular types of transactions through mobile banking according to the central bank data.

In terms of amount transacted, the growth was 186 per cent, and the growth of customers was 262 per cent in the previous year.

At the beginning of the year 2013, the total number of agents was 59,559 and at the end of the year the number has become 1, 88,647.

The number of MFS customer was just 5 million in April 2013 and the number crossed the milestone of 10 million in November 2013. In December 2013, it has reached at 13.18 million, which demonstrates the growing popularity of the service.

According to the BB, 19 banks out of 28 approved banks are delivering the MFS services. Of them, Brac Bank, Dutch Bangla Bank and Islami Bank Bangladesh Ltd are in leading positions.