While there is no doubt that bKash rules the roost in the mobile financial services arena, Nagad, the digital financial arm of the Bangladesh Post Office, is fast catching up.
On March 7, a record 2.87 lakh people opened accounts with Nagad, meaning three people joined its network every second that day, according to a press release from Nagad. On the previous, about 2.5 lakh came on board.
Nagad’s surge comes at a time when the pace of new account openings on the platform has dropped off since September last year, according to data from the Bangladesh Bank.
Besides, the number of active accounts, which are accounts that had made transactions over the previous 90 days, is on the wane, too.
At the end of January, there were 3.2 crore MFS accounts, down 2.6 per cent year-on-year, making it the third straight month of decline.
However, transactions through the platform stood at Tk 57,253.1 crore, which is the second-highest in its decade-old journey, on the back of higher person-to-person and cash-in transactions.
Nagad credits the spike in account openings on the ease with which new accounts can be opened: 95 per cent of the accounts were opened by dialling *167# from the mobile phone and setting a personal identification number.
The MFS provider then pulls the information of the customer from the mobile operators’ database by way of an agreement it had signed.
Since the mobile operators have the information of a national identification (NID) number of a subscriber, whenever a prospective user dials *167# to express his or her interest to open the MFS account, their information is instantly verified against the NID database and the process to open the account is completed.
“From the very beginning, we wanted to take Nagad to the people across the country very easily,” said Tanvir Ahmed Mishuk, managing director of Nagad.
And the hassle-free account opening process was part of the plan.
“Hopefully, we will become the most popular MFS operator in the country very soon,” he said, adding that Nagad’s market share is 30 per cent at present.
He is hoping to corner 50 per cent of the market by this year.
