Regional financial intuition leaders praise Nagad’s PPP model, want to replicate innovations

Top regional financial intuitions leaders praised the public-private partnership model of Nagad, a mobile financial service arm of Bangladesh Post Office, saying that this can be the role model for include the unaccounted population in the book.

In the 11th CEO TALK of the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT) at Thailand styled on "Innovative Technology for Financial Inclusion in a Public-Private Partnership", the regional financial intuitions top leaders also showed their keen interest to replicate the innovations of Nagad in their country to accelerate financial incursions, said a Nagad press release on Saturday.

Co-founder and managing director of Nagad and key speaker of the event, Tanvir A Mishuk said that even with different challenges the government is ready to facilitate the public-private partnership if the private entities are equipped with the correct tools and initiatives.

Tanvir A Mishuk also said that his next ambitious project will be launching a digital bank and he is planning to launch it by 2022 to provide 360-degree financial services to the citizens of the country.

Dr Sundar Venkatesh, program director of School of Management at AIT, moderated the session while Dr Naveed Anwar, vice president of Knowledge Transfer at AIT deliver the welcome speech, the release said.

Attending the session Dr Syed Abdulla Al Mamun, chief executive officer of Bangladesh Rating Agency Limited, a subsidiary of Dun & Bradstreet SAME said he is witnessing to see the incredible journey of Nagad and found it as a benchmarking startup journey of Bangladesh.

"I am appreciating the approaches that the Nagad come forward, especially promote innovation in the organizational level, which is imaging."

Point to the traditional banking system Sanjib Subba, Intern CEO at Nepal Electronic Payment System Ltd, said the big giants will fall within a short time, maybe in the next decade and with the help of digitalization startups will lead the world.

"I am quite sure that initiative like Nagad that are doing excellent thinks by introducing the digital Know Your Customers (d-KYC) process will be the game-changer in the coming days. My country also can replicate the digital KYC system which I believe will help the end-users to avoid language jargons."

Subba also expresses his excitement to see the financial inclusion process of Nagad and Bangladesh as a country while visiting several times here said there are enormous opportunities for a company like this to change the process.

Dr Weerakoon Wijewardena, former deputy governor of the central bank of Sri Lanka; M Nurul Alam, a former chief compliant officer of Banglalink, a leading mobile phone operator of Bangladesh, CPA Karunatilake a former top official of the central bank of Sri Lanka also spoke at the event and praised Tanvir's innovations and initiatives, which they were saying can be replicated in some other countries in this part of the world.

Tanvir A Mishuk said, "Initially we have faced so many challenges even from our partner, the postal department, but later they have supported me and with the government encouragement we have achieved. The countries in the region always complain about the red taping but with correct solutions and hard work this challenge can be met."

"The Postal Department was a loss-making project for a while and with our innovative ideas, we decided to partner with it. Initially, there were some challenges. But as I understood, with the infrastructure of the Postal Department we can make the difference," he explained.

Tanvir, who successfully built 12 other enterprises before Nagad, also had to struggle when he preached this plan, said, "To be honest, my board members were little shaky but thank to whatever little I achieved before, they agreed to go on with based on my experience."

When Nagad was about to start there were already 30 MFS licensees of which the only one succeed. And that situation also pushed Tanvir to do so much groundwork visiting all over the country, even places where there is no internet.

After launching its service in March 2019, Nagad already becomes the second-largest MFS carrier in the country and become the fastest-growing carrier of this kind of payment system in the world.