Bankers and fintech companies have urged the Bangladesh Bank to introduce supportive guidelines so that banks and fintech companies can share data based on customer consent keeping data privacy and security.
They came up with the call at a roundtable dialogue on “API and Open Banking: New Service Innovation for Banks and Fintech Companies” organised by the Bangladesh Association of Software and Information Services (BASIS) Standing Committee on Fintech, held at Lakeshore Hotel Gulshan in Dhaka on Wednesday, said a press release on Friday.
The session emphasised that any financial transaction data is owned by the customer or user. Banks or mobile financial services are only custodians of the data. If any user wants to share the data to any third party to get any financial services like loans from any other financial organisation, the custodian banks should make provision for that data sharing.
Bangladesh Bank Executive Director Md Khurshid Alam chaired the roundtable where Association of Bankers (ABB) Chairman Selim Hossain was the special guest. The event was moderated by BASIS Committee Chairman on Fintech and CEO of Bdjobs.com Fahim Mashroor.
Discussants make the suggestion for introducing API-based open banking so that more people can be brought under banking services.
Todd Schweitzer, CEO of Brankas, an open banking fintech company in the Philippines and Singapore, shared best practices of open banking in the Southeast Asian region. Payment Service Department of Bangladesh Bank Deputy Director Jayanta Bhoumic gave another keynote on the topics and discussed the possible roadmap of API-based open banking in Bangladesh. Circle Fintech CEO Redwan Ansary gave a presentation on the required policy support for enabling greater partnership between banks and fintech companies.
“The Bangladesh Bank will facilitate new innovation by young fintech entrepreneurs by giving them all kinds of regulatory support,” BB Executive Director Khurshid Alam said.
“Open banking is the best way to solve the big problem of low loan disbursement ratio of banks to the MSME segment. The problem of high operation cost for banks for MSME loan disbursement and repayment can be solved by open banking based digital lending," BASIS Committee Chairman on Fintech Fahim Mashroor said.
BASIS President Russel T Ahmed, Vice-President Fahim Ahmed along with over 30 BASIS member companies were present at the roundtable.
High officials of 20 leading commercial banks and over 30 fintech entrepreneurs also attended the roundtable.
Head of IT and digital banking of a number of banks including BRAC Bank, UCB, HSBC, Bank Asia, Islami Bank, Mutual Trust Bank, City Bank, Jamuna, bKash, Nagad, Upay and other financial institutions attended the program and discussed the topics.
