Bangladesh

RMG payroll digitisation is the structural growth catalyst

Bangladesh's ~4.4m ready-made-garments workforce (Asia's largest single-sector formal labour pool) sat on a cash-payroll base through the 2010s. The government's 2022 directive on digital payroll for export-zone factories has been progressively enforced; by end-2025, more than 75% of RMG worker wages flow into MFS wallets (predominantly bKash and Nagad) rather than envelopes. The on-ramp creates a sticky merchant-payment, savings and credit funnel that defines the next decade of MFS revenue evolution.

Binimoy made the wallet, bank and PSP-to-PSP rail interoperable

Bangladesh Bank launched Binimoy in November 2022 as the country's interoperable digital transaction platform, designed to clear A2A, wallet-to-bank, bank-to-wallet and wallet-to-wallet flows on a single rail with a unified ID schema (mobile, NID, virtual address). Initial onboarding was slow on operator commercial-terms friction; the BB-PSPs-banks compromise reached in mid-2024 has lifted Binimoy clearing materially through 2025. The architecture is closer to Pix than to UPI — central-bank-operated rather than association-operated.

The 2024 taka unification reset cross-border lines under IMF conditionality

Bangladesh Bank formally unified the official and market rates in July 2024 under IMF Extended Credit Facility conditionality, moving the taka from a managed peg around BDT 110/USD to a crawling-peg around BDT 118 with periodic adjustments. The immediate effect on payments was that exporters and remittance corridors that had been bypassing the official channel via informal hundi flows started routing through MFS-licensed channels at parity. Wage-earners' remittance inflows for FY2024-25 hit US$26.6bn, the highest on record, with bKash and Nagad capturing measurable share against the legacy bank-and-MTO model.

MFS providers built P2P and bill-payment first; merchant payments are the next category to scale. The Binimoy interoperability layer makes the underlying acceptance economics workable for small merchants, where single-network lock-in had previously throttled adoption. PSPs that bundle bKash, Nagad, Rocket and Binimoy acceptance with low-cost POS or QR hardware capture the early share in tier-1 and tier-2 cities.

The 2.5% government incentive on wage-earner remittances routed through official channels (including bKash and Nagad inbound corridors) has pulled measurable volume back from informal hundi. With KSA, UAE, MY, US and GB as the top five source corridors, MFS providers that can hold last-mile distribution costs below the legacy bank-MTO stack capture the next leg. CEBL (City Bank) and Eastern Bank cross-border partnerships into bKash inbound flow are the live commercial-deployment template.

Five years of MFS transaction history on the bKash and Nagad bases is the underwriting layer for a credit product set Bangladesh's bank system has structurally underserved. bKash's pilot with City Bank on short-tenor wallet-collateral consumer credit is the live regulated template; Bangladesh Bank's 2024 microcredit framework revision created the licensing pathway. Operators that can underwrite RMG-worker and small-trader segments at sub-25% APR without legacy bank cost structure are the structural winners.