As Bangladesh emerges from the status of a least developed economy, initiatives focused on financial inclusion -- with a special emphasis on integrating the vast majority of people outside formal economies into systemic financial systems -- need to be prioritized.
While this is one area that has seen tremendous growth in recent years, with mobile financial services like bKash and Nagad leading a technology-driven inclusive revolution, there is still more to be done, especially at a policy level.
Recent studies have found that around 60 million Bangladeshis are un-banked, with 60% of these people unable to use banks without assistance. Furthermore, the current banking scenario, with its emphasis on paper records and complex bureaucratic structures, is needlessly complicated and outdated.
However, there have been initiatives to properly study the bottlenecks within this sector and formulate recommendations for streamlining. Government services in general are moving towards integrating technological support in their operations to mitigate the myriad of issues people face. The local startup scene is also increasingly focusing on providing technology-based solutions with an emphasis on the financial sector.
But relying on the private sector to pick up the slack of the government on this front is non a sustainable solution.
The administration needs to make changes to the overall financial sector by streamlining operations and make sure that the benefits of these changes are communicated to people outside traditional financial systems.
Ultimately, if we fail to bring a greater number of people under systemic financial systems, we won't be able to leverage the full potential of our economy. For a country as ambitious as ours, that is simply unacceptable.