BB will help Nagad management to make it worthy competitor of bKash: Governor

The Bangladesh Bank will work with Nagad's new management in a bid to ready it for new strategic investors and make it a real worthy competitor of bKash, Governor Ahsan H Mansur said on Thursday (17 October).

"Our objective is not to destroy Nagad, rather it is to rebuild it much stronger," he said in a stakeholder consultation titled "Revitalising Financial Inclusion in Bangladesh " organised by the Policy Research Institute (PRI) in association with Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Policy Advocacy Initiative in hotel in the capital's Gulshan.

"We have lots of problems in the mobile financial service (MFS) sector. Basically, we have one player - bKash. Nagad is considered number two. But it has lots of other issues, including transparency, accountability, not having proper licence, not following the regulatory guideline and so on.

"We need big players. Upay and Rocket are certainly players, but small ones. …..Nagad can potentially be that [big player]," he also said.

The former economist of the International Monetary Fund also talked about the country's financial sector and said that it was becoming shallower.

He said, "Bangladesh's financial market's depth was about 64% of GDP in 2016, however, now it has decreased to 54%."

Other banking and financial experts expressed some challenges in the current MFS system.

Meanwhile, presenting the keynote paper at the event, MA Razzaque highlighted financial literacy.

Referring to Financial Inclusion Insights of Intermedia Research, he said, "As of December 2023, financial literacy in Bangladesh stood at only 28%."

Snigdha Ali, country lead of Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Shah Zia-Ul Haque, additional director of Bangladesh Bank, Fahmida Khatun, executive director of Center for Policy Dialogue spoke at the discussion among others.