Cashless Bangladesh
The cashless Bangladesh initiate has several components like e-commerce, Point of Sales and QR Code on the acquiring side, and mobile apps, credit & debit cards, MFS accounts, Agent Banking accounts are on the issuing side. The most important part for success of cashless Bangladesh initiatives is to extend the availability of acquiring tools to all segment of people of the country including the rural ones.
The e-commerce or online payment may be categories to the payment of goods/services sold by the e-commerce merchants, and the government & utility payment. The payment of goods / service against purchases made by a citizen is now-a-day largely based on cash-on-delivery. Buyers don't want to pay before receiving the online products. The cashless initiate must address to discourage cash-on-delivery and encourage the online payments.
The online utility like electricity, water & gas bills and government payments like duty, tax, land related fees have made a good progress. Receiving tuition fees and other educational charges till needs a further boost to become fully cashless. The Point of Sale (POS) terminals is another important tool for cashless Bangladesh. But this tool is available in big cities only. Due to its high cost, banks may not find it feasible to install the POS terminals in the small shops & businesses. Moreover, the acquiring business is not profitable as bank gets commission from merchants which is much lower than what it has to pass on to the card issuing bank, thus making loss in every transaction. As a result, the population of POS terminals are not increasing in the country which ultimately hampering the cashless Bangladesh initiative.
QR Code is not yet popular in Bangladesh although this tool is very cost effective to install in the SME merchants throughout the country. Bangla QR is designed by Bangladesh Bank to use by customers of any banks and MFS with a view to bring interoperability in the QR Code regime. Payment using Bangla QR Code needs that the user must have a smart phone which is a hurdle for QR Code payment. On the other hand, big MFS players are yet to adopt it.
On the issuing side, issues like incentive to the cashless users, limiting accessibility to NID database (used for customers digital onboarding), interoperability, awareness program for the users and reducing cost of smart phones must be considered to make the Cashless Bangladesh initiative a success.
