Nagad, a leading mobile financial service provider in Bangladesh, has been bringing 50,800 customers on average a day under its network over the last four years, thanks to its continuous innovations tailored to provide customers with products and services at affordable costs.
Since its inauguration by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina on March 26, 2019, Nagad has till date provided its customers with seamless services in line with their changing needs. The MFS operator's registered customers now stand at around 7.43 crore, contributing massively to people's adoption of digital financial transactions, said officials at Nagad.
Nagad, with a massive customer base, now sees its average transactions reach Taka 1,000 crore a day and at times surpass the amount.
Since its inception as an arm of Bangladesh Postal Department, the mobile money carrier expanded at a faster pace and gained a strong foothold in the MFS market in a quick time.
Nagad officials said from the beginning, Nagad offers various services at lower costs and many even free of cost, thus saving around Taka 1,000 crore of customers a year.
Tanvir A Mishuk, founder and managing director of Nagad, said, "We wanted to bring comfort to people's lives and ensure their financial freedom. We're providing our customers with quality services at the costs lowest in the market, and it has been possible because we use state-of-the-art technologies."
"We are now working on ensuring a complete digital financial solution for our customers," he added.
Nagad has reached many milestones with its customer-centric products and services within a short time since its entry in the MFS market. The introduction of the electronic know-your-customer (e-KYC) by Nagad was a game-changing innovation, which brought an end to cumbersome paperwork in opening an account.
Customers can open accounts within a minute by taking a photo of their national identity card and a selfie using their smartphones. Other MFS providers and banks adopted the e-KYC innovated by Nagad, which reduced their costs of doing business.
Later, to bring many feature phone users in rural areas under financial inclusion, Nagad made agreements with Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) and telecom operators to add all mobile subscribers to its platform. A Nagad account can now be opened by simply dialling *167# from their feature phones without using mobile application.
In this way, a large portion of rural people got access to mobile financial services offered by Nagad. Such innovations have also earned Nagad many accolades at home and abroad.
Another notable work that Nagad has done is that it digitalised disbursements of government allowances and education stipends, thus ensuring transparency. The allowances are now reaching intended beneficiaries directly.
In the last two years, Nagad has successfully disbursed 75 percent of all the social safety net allowances, such as old-age allowance, widow allowance, allowance for the underprivileged with special needs and students with special needs.
Moreover, Nagad is disbursing stipends among primary school children with transparency and accuracy, bringing an end to numerous hassles that many guardians experienced before.
In the last two years, the government disbursed Taka 20,000 crore through Nagad. In this way, the government's costs of disbursements dropped to a great extent.
Nagad is now working to establish a digital bank to bring all financial services at people's fingertips.
Source: Bangladesh Sangbad Sangstha