Chaldal Payments Limited, a subsidiary of Chaldal Limited, has received a no-objection certificate (NOC) from Bangladesh Bank to develop the technical infrastructure and platform as a payment service provider (PSP).
This permission will allow Chaldal to facilitate payments or payment processes directly to the customers and settle their transactions through a scheduled bank or financial institution.
Chaldal was working for a long time to build an e-wallet platform and signed an agreement with Brac Bank as a settlement partner.
Based on the PSP license, Chaldal Payments Limited is going to build an e-wallet that will make online transactions safer, faster and more secure.
Commenting on the platform’s expansion into the fintech arena, its founder Waseem Alim told Dhaka Tribune: “Fintech is a very large field with lots of opportunities to build great software and make consumers’ lives easier. We hope to play a role in the evolution of Bangladesh into a cashless society.
“We can offer more interesting features like immediate refunds and subscriptions. But all proposals will go through vetting from the central bank,” he added.
Chaldal is the largest grocery platform, serving millions of customers across multiple cities in Bangladesh. It has built a network of logistics and supply chains where hundreds of partners keep working round the clock.
Millions of transactions are made each day, offering a secure and safe payment process is an integral part of the business.
Over the past years, Chaldal has made a number of diversification efforts within grocery, food and medicine delivery through its subsidiaries — notably GogoBangla, Cookups and BanglaMeds.
It has not only built a successful grocery business but also built an end-to-end supply chain creating a direct backward linkage with farmers as well as a forward linkage with smallholder retailers, allowing it greater leverage in the grocery supply chain.
The new payment wing should help Chaldal better integrate its existing operation and reach out to a new customer base.
With Covid-19 making digital shopping more popular than ever, Chaldal stepped up its efforts and expanded its footprint in two cities, starting its operation in Khulna on November 10 last year and in Sylhet on January 18, taking the number of big cities it's operating into six.
It expanded to Chittagong in March last year, Jessore in April and Narayanganj towards the end of 2020. It has partial operations in Tangail and Cox's Bazar.
The expansion of Chaldal followed its announcement in September last year of raising $10 million. It has raised $28 million to $30 million since its inception in 2013.
Chaldal has 25 delivery warehouses in six cities. Of them, 17 are in Dhaka and eight are outside of the capital. It wants to lift the number of warehouses across the country to 100 by 2022.
The company also plans to roll out its operation in Rajshahi, Gazipur, Mymensingh and Comilla as it looks to establish its presence in 15-20 districts by 2022.
Prior to the pandemic, the platform saw 2,500 deliveries daily on average, which increased to around 12,000 deliveries now driven by the growing demand for home delivery for groceries, hygiene products and other consumer staples.
Its revenue clocked more than 200% growth in 2020 and 65% in 2021.
