MFS transactions on rise

Transactions through mobile financial services in Bangladesh rose 5.4 per cent year-on-year to Tk 66,387 crore in July as people's habit to use the cashless mode of payments persists despite the reopening of the economy and easing of coronavirus restrictions.

Transactions amounted to Tk 63,000 crore in the same month a year ago and Tk 62,993 crore in June this year, data from the Bangladesh Bank showed.

On average, Tk 2,141 crore was transacted every day in July.

There are 15 banks that operate MFS services in Bangladesh. Besides, Nagad Ltd, the digital financial service of the Bangladesh Postal Office, also provides mobile banking service.

Inward remittance channelled through MFS providers increased 67 per cent year-on-year to Tk 282 crore in July, BB data showed. 

Salary disbursement stood at Tk 3,403 crore, down from Tk 4,586 crore a year ago, while users paid utility bills worth Tk 992 crore, against Tk 878 crore in July last year.

The bills paid through the system for shopping trebled to Tk 3,096 crore from Tk 1,134 crore.

However, the government payment through the channel declined to Tk 541 crore in July compared to Tk 1,076 crore in the same month in 2020.

The number of registered mobile banking accounts stood at 10.27 crore at the end of July, while active accounts numbered 4.12 crore.

There are 11.42 lakh agents across the country. 

Mobile Financial Services (MFS) is a system or way by which a financial institution provides services to the people with the combination of banking and mobile wireless networks that enables users to perform banking transaction. Many financial institutions are offering innovative services to the customers to make life more easy and comfortable by harnessing the modern technology. In Bangladesh It has been fairly a new concept. Bkash has been successful to offer better services since 2011 even if DBBL was the pioneer in this market. There are also some other financial service providers who are not in a remarkable position in the marketplace.

However, the purpose of this study was to measure the attitude of the customers towards financial services under the shadow of the concept of mobile banking and also to find out how these financial services sway customers in their buying decisions in case of buy anything of other company’s products. This was a quantitative analysis.150 respondents were surveyed in savar area for this purpose. Respondents were surveyed at different agent points at different areas in savar although responses were obtained mostly through online questionnaire using online goggle forms mostly. It was found that customers have positive attitude towards mobile financial services as it makes their life easy and also for convenience, trust, security, risk reduction, availability of agents points etc of the MFSP. However, people prefer bkash, most that has captured a unique position in the mind of customers because of its user friendliness and heavy mass communication although DBBL rocket is doing good. But other service providers like Surecash, Mycash,Ucash etc have a very unremarkable position in the market and an irony of fate that still many customers are not cognizant of many of the financial service providers.