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bKash Bangladesh: What Explains its Fast Start?

bKash is the fastest growing provider of mobile financial services in Bangladesh, having registered 11 million accounts in just 30 months. Several factors have combined to help bKash be an early success in a relatively new market.

bKash Bangladesh: A Fast Start for Mobile Financial Services

bKash launched in the second half of 2011, grew to 2 million accounts by the end of 2012, and shot up to 11 million registered accounts by the end of 2013.

Bangladesh’s COVID-19 Response Is Taking Digital Finance to New Levels

Bangladesh’s policies in response to COVID-19 have enabled more low-income people to benefit from digital financial services.

2017 Global Findex: Behind the Numbers on Bangladesh

Bangladesh has made great strides toward financial inclusion, but many challenges remain -- including one of the largest gender gaps in the world.

Bank-Led Digital Finance: Who’s Really Leading?

In countries where regulators favor “bank-led” digital finance models, nonbanks are playing important – even dominant – roles in digital finance.

CGAP Pays Tribute to Sir Fazle Hasan Abed, K.C.M.G., the Founder of BRAC and Former CGAP Board Member

Abed was instrumental in shaping CGAP and remains an inspiration in combating poverty

Daily Diaries Reveal Bangladesh’s Shifting Financial Landscape

In Bangladesh, 50 respondents are providing full daily details of all transactions in an ongoing financial diaries project. This project aims to provide insights into the money management behavior of low-income rural Bangladeshis. What have the diaries revealed so far?

CGAP CEO's Women's Economic Empowerment TechSprint Conference Speech

FINANCIAL CONDUCT AUTHORITY

Greta Bull, CGAP CEO
Address to Women's Economic Empowerment TechSprint Conference
March 22, 2021

Can MFIs Leverage Mobile Banking to Serve Customers Better?

When given the choice of using a mobile payment platform - bKash - or a traditional bank branch, 42% of business borrowers in a BRAC pilot chose to use both options for making payments.

How Hard Is It to Use Mobile Money as a Rural Bangladeshi Woman?

Women in Bangladesh have one of the lowest rates of mobile money usage in the world. Does the dearth of usage indicate a lack of appropriate products and services? Just how hard is it to use mobile money if you are a rural Bangladeshi woman?

Telenor’s Shared Agents: Digital Finance Catalyst for Bangladesh?

New business models for agent networks, such as shared agent networks, are emerging and may offer more sustainable, competitive and efficient mobile financial services.

What Should We Realistically Expect from Regulatory Sandboxes?

Just how far could regulatory sandboxes go toward spurring financial innovations in low-income countries?

Comparing Branchless Banking in Bangladesh and Pakistan

What can be learned from benchmarking Bangladesh to the regional leader Pakistan which had begun two years earlier in 2009? Both have similar populations, mobile penetration and income levels making the comparison even more interesting.

Digital Finance in Bangladesh: Where are all the Women?

Bangladesh has long been a success story for women’s financial inclusion, but in terms of digital finance, the story is very different.

FI2020: Scarcity, Tunneling and Financial Inclusion

The pressure and distraction of living in scarcity - constantly having too little and constantly worrying about making day-to-day ends meet - ultimately affects poor people's decision-making abilities. Evidence suggests that this "scarcity" framework has serious implications for financial inclusion, especially regarding the uptake of new products and services.

The Growth of Mobile Financial Services in Bangladesh

In early 2010, we blogged about the steps identified for mobile financial services to take off in Bangladesh. Bangladesh has moved partly down this path. A newly released overview report on Mobile Financial Services by Bangladesh’s Central Bank highlights the progress achieved two years on.

Open Data and the Future of Banking

Although growing numbers of low-income people are entering the formal financial system, many are not yet leveraging its full value. Emerging regimes for data sharing and payments flexibility have the potential to bypass traditional financial sector development and give poor customers better products and more choices.

Six Takeaways from Rwanda’s Financial Inclusion Insights Survey

Even though Rwanda has low rates of technical literacy and handset usage, digital financial services have reached the same levels of active usage as Ghana, which has a much more "mobile-ready" population.

Promoting Competition in Mobile Payments: The Role of USSD

Unstructured supplementary service data (USSD), a communications service controlled by mobile network operators, is a critical piece of infrastructure used to provide mobile financial services on most phones, at low cost, and without requiring access to the user’s SIM card.

Technology Must Solve Real Problems for Low-Income Customers

We are just scratching the surface of what digital technology can do for low-income consumers. Mobile has been a game changer, but what's next? There are even more powerful digital tools in the pipeline.