Khan Bank's Branch-and-Mobile Network: Digital Banking for Mongolia's Herders

Mongolia has the world's lowest population density and a large share of its roughly 3.3 million people still herd livestock across vast, sparsely connected terrain. Khan Bank, the country's largest lender, built its branch network to follow that population rather than wait for it to urbanise: by the mid-2010s it operated around 530 branches reaching every province, district centre and official border point, part of a national network that Oxford Business Group calculated at 69 bank branches per 100,000 people — far above South Korea (18), Russia (38) or China (8) at the time.
Khan Bank installed its first ATM outside the capital in 2007 and had grown to over 300 ATMs nationwide within a few years, while launching mobile banking the same year so herders could check balances and move money over basic phones without a branch visit — mobile penetration in Mongolia had reached roughly 124% of the population. More than 100 savings-and-credit cooperatives, over half of them outside Ulaanbaatar, complemented the bank network, and government universal-service funding had connected at least 35 districts to broadband by the early 2010s.
By 2023, Khan Bank reported that 99.4% of all its banking transactions were conducted digitally and that it served 2.9 million customers nationwide; a $130 million IFC syndicated loan in the mid-2020s was earmarked partly for women-owned rural businesses, and the bank has since won Euromoney's 'Mongolia's best bank' award in multiple recent years. These figures come from the bank itself and financial-press reporting rather than an independent household survey of herders specifically, so they describe network reach and digital adoption at the institutional level, not a controlled evaluation of impact on herder incomes or welfare.
The steady sequence — branch expansion, then ATMs, then mobile/SMS banking, then agent- and app-based digital channels — reflects an institution adapting its delivery model in stages to a dispersed, mobile-first customer base, rather than one that formally publishes lessons-learned reports.

Read the full analysis: https://oxfordbusinessgroup.com/reports/mongolia/2015-report/economy/mongolian-banks-strong-track-record-in-reaching-residents-in-remote-areas