Analyzing customer expectations toward financial services of mobile

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.