bKash — Mobile Financial Services Reshaping Financial Inclusion in Bangladesh

bKash launched on 21 July 2011 as a joint venture between BRAC Bank and Money in Motion LLC. Its agent network grew from 50,000 points in 2013 to about 350,000 today, enabling person-to-person mobile money transfers in a country then underserved by traditional bank branches.
The user base grew from 2 million in 2012 to nearly 84 million verified accounts, representing about 3.8% of the world's mobile money users, according to growth figures documented by The Business Standard.
Bangladesh Bank's Financial Inclusion Report 2024 records 238.6 million mobile financial services accounts nationwide (up 8.3% year-on-year) and Tk 164,000 crore in MFS transactions, a 32.02% increase; independent research cited by The Business Standard finds every Tk 1 billion increase in bKash transactions correlates with a 0.48–0.71 percentage-point fall in the poverty rate.
By 2024, roughly one million garment-sector workers, 60% of them women, received salaries directly into bKash accounts instead of cash, and in 2025 expatriate workers sent an estimated Tk 200 billion in remittances directly into bKash accounts from more than 170 countries.
These figures are largely drawn from industry and central-bank reporting rather than independent experimental studies, and national inclusion still faces urban-rural and gender gaps: Bangladesh Bank notes that female deposit accounts, despite growing from 5.07 to 5.5 crore in 2024, remain a minority of the total.

Read the full analysis: https://www.tbsnews.net/supplement/bkash-revolution-how-fin-tech-pioneer-redefined-financial-inclusion-bangladesh-1480981