Abstract:
Bangladesh has a rapidly growing mobile financial services industry, with at least 10 providers
already offering services on the market, and more than 8% of the total registered mobile money
accounts globally. All this has happened in less than four years since the launch of the first
mobile financial service products in 2011. After launching in July 2011, bKash has achieved
tremendous growth in the following years. It reached the milestone of 11 million accounts by
the end of 2013, just 30 months after its launch. It is now the world’s largest mobile financial
services (MFS) company with almost 28 million users, which is very impressive since only
legally adult people, who are at least 18 years of age, can be enlisted as a bKash user. It stated
out only as a money transfer channel, but now it offers diversified services such as making
payments, buying airtime, and receiving remittance along with sending and receiving money.
In the few years since the launch of the MFS guidelines, the sector has shown significant
growth. As Bangladesh is a banked model, all of the MFS products on the market are run by
banks or their subsidiaries. Bangladesh Bank has allowed 28 banks to offer MFS, of which 19
banks have already started to work on their MFS products in some capacity. Detailed
discussions with the majority of those banks, however, have revealed that only 10 of them have
gone operational and are providing MFS on any sort ofscale (as of 2015). The remaining banks
are still working on finalizing their transaction platforms, terms of engagement with partners,
business model, and strategies.
