Microfinance institutions (MFIs) should not charge their clients for making payments digitally, stakeholders said on Wednesday. They called on MFIs to bear such additional fees themselves.
Experts made the remarks during the two-day long international conference on ‘Making Digital Finance Work for Women’ organised by BRAC Institute of Governance and Development at the Brac Centre in the capital.
Speaking at a session of the seminar as a panellist, Moonmoon Shehrin, also the lead for the Digital Cluster unit of BRAC Microfinance, said, “We don’t have a digital financial service framework at the moment. Our regulatory body does not have the framework that says that how much we can charge our clients in terms of MIFs digital initiatives,”
He said the cost (digital cost) borne by the client, shouldn’t be borne by them but the organisation concerned.
She said to ensure a level playing field for all, the government needs to assert a framework for all the MFIs.
Meanwhile, moderating the session, Imran Ahmed, deputy executive director of Shakti Foundation, argued that a plan could be viable in this regard for financial institutions like Brac who have huge margins with benefits.
Responding to his remarks, Moonmoon Shehrin said this is where the regulator comes in. For the benefit of the poor, the regulators have to ensure the facilities.
Earlier, in a post-budget conference on June 2, Bangladesh Bank Governor Abdur Rouf Talukder said the government aims to transform 75 per cent of the country’s financial transactions to digital platforms within the next four years.
The board of Bangladesh Bank (BB) has also approved guidelines on digital banks to expedite the process of cashless transactions and digital transformation in the country last week.
In the meantime, Leora Klapper, an economist of the World Bank, presented the data from the Global Findex Database 2021 at the seminar.
She said during their research, they have seen that in South Asia, Bangladesh is the country with the highest number of wage transitions while India has the highest number of accounts.
Professor Shahaduz Zaman, Medical Anthropology and Global Health (Global Health and Infection), Brighton and Sussex Medical School, University of Sussex, gave a presentation on Digital Onboarding Challenges in Bangladesh.
He said lack of understanding about digital financial services (DFS), limited digital and financial literacy, compounded by the influence of cultural norms, religious beliefs, and social values, necessitates a holistic socio-cultural understanding of their experiences with DFS.
The conference was inaugurated by Executive Director of BIGD Imran Matin and joined by global leading academics including Michael Carter of the University of California, Timothy Ogden of the Financial Access Initiative at NYU-Wagner, Erica Field of Duke University and Munshi Sulaiman of BIGD.
