By Md. Mahmudul Hasan, Deputy General Manager, Business Strategy at UCB Fintech Company Limited| hasan_syd21@yahoo.com.au
Imagine buying a car. You choose the model, the colour and the dealer, and you settle the price. Then, instead of leaving the showroom to gather documents and queue at a bank, you find the financing is already there. The system recognises you, understands your income and transaction history, and presents a personalised offer. You accept it on your phone, the dealer is paid, and the car is yours. At no point do you think, “I need to go to a bank.” That, to me, is the real promise of digital banking.
In a recent piece in these pages, I argued that Bangladesh’s new digital banks must define their business model before choosing partners. Bangladesh Bank has now issued letters of intent to five proposed digital banks, backed by bKash, Banglalink’s parent VEON, Robi’s parent Axiata and Bhutan’s DK Bank, alongside Kori Digital Bank. The easy path for them is obvious: take a conventional bank, remove the branch and build an app. The harder and more valuable path is to build a financial institution around the way people actually live.
A young customer does not wake up thinking about a current account or a personal loan. She thinks about university, a new phone, her first job, a wedding or a small business idea. A woman entrepreneur needs to buy inventory today, collect payments tomorrow, keep household and business money apart, and build savings along the way. A non-resident Bangladeshi wants to send money home, cover her parents’ medical bills and perhaps buy property, all from thousands of kilometres away. These are financial journeys, and they cut straight across the product silos that banks are organised around. A digital bank should be built around moments in a customer’s life—education, health, housing, travel and enterprise—so that the right product appears when the need arises.
Bangladesh has an unusual head start. By December 2024, MFS providers held around 237 million registered accounts, but only 37.6 per cent were active. The reach exists; the depth of relationship does not. Digital banks can close that gap, but not by building everything themselves. Under the regulatory framework, they cannot run branches, ATMs or cash machines and must reach customers through other institutions. For them, partnership is a structural requirement.
That makes the digital bank an orchestrator. It can connect universities, hospitals, carmakers, insurers, merchants and fintechs through APIs, so that finance appears inside the journey rather than at the end of it. A student sees an instalment option when the semester fee falls due. A family facing a hospital bill is offered a manageable repayment plan at the point of payment. An NRB sends money home and can see, plan and fund the family’s wider needs from one place. In each case, the bank becomes the infrastructure behind the moment.
The economics make this possible. Brazil’s Nubank closed 2025 with 131 million customers. In its latest annual filing, it estimates its cost to serve at about 85 per cent below Brazilian incumbents, with roughly 14,314 customers per employee against about 1,234 at incumbent banks. When serving a customer costs that little, small and frequent financial needs can become commercially viable. That is particularly relevant in a market like Bangladesh, where millions of people remain outside or only lightly connected to formal financial services.
Relationships then compound. Monzo reported 15.2 million customers in its 2026 annual report, with 49 per cent of monthly active users treating it as their primary bank and 79 per cent of customers joining through word of mouth. Revolut ended 2025 with 68.3 million retail customers and 11 product lines each earning more than about US$135 million. A customer may begin with payments, then move into savings, credit, insurance and investment. The products change, but the relationship grows, and it becomes the true unit of growth.
The smartphone is only the interface. Underneath it sit data, APIs, risk engines, partnerships and intelligent decision-making, working together to understand what a customer needs, when she needs it and what she can responsibly afford.
That last point is the condition for everything else. A bank that sees how much you earn, where you spend and whom you pay holds real power over your financial life. It must use that power openly, asking permission for data, explaining its decisions in plain language and refusing to lend what a customer cannot repay. Otherwise, embedded finance simply becomes embedded debt.
Bangladesh does not need five more banking apps. It needs a new banking experience, one in which finance is contextual, intelligent and present exactly when life calls for it. The best digital bank may be the one customers stop thinking of as a bank at all.
