Microsoft founder Bill Gates has lauded the mobile banking services in Bangladesh saying that banking on digital technology would bring financial services to the world’s poor.
Bill Gates is the co-chairman of Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which has investment in one of Bangladesh’s mobile financial service providers, bKash.‘Rich people take for granted loans, insurance, banking and other financial services that poor people have little access to,’ said Gates in an interview with the Wall Street Journal in the past week before delivering the keynote address at Sibos, a banking-industry conference in Boston.
Referring to the bKash, Gates said that nearly 13 million people in Bangladesh were getting financial services, transferring money, paying in shops as bKash ‘exploited ubiquity of cellphones to deliver a needed service.’
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has made financial services for the poor one of its priorities, supports services that enable digital payments and charge fees
as low as 1.0 per cent of the transaction.
Gates, in the interview, said digital transactions could be processed at a fraction of the cost of financial services offered in the developed world.
While delivering the keynote speech, Gates cited that nearly 70 per cent of Bangladeshis have mobile phones when only about 15 per cent of the south Asian nation’s population has access to formal financial services.
He termed the high rate of cellphones use in Bangladesh as the ‘wild adoption of technology’, which is bringing in positive changes to the society.
-With New Age input
