Dutch Bangla Mobile Banking, the second largest mobile banking service in the country, has re-branded to Rocket, said an announcement by the company. Now on, the company will be focusing more on growing its agent network which trails bKash by a good margin.
DBBL launched mobile banking service back in 2012 in partnership with Airtel initially. bKash, started in 2011, was already a dominant player in the market by then. However, the company managed to push through and became the second largest players in the market but it never been able to close the market share gap with bKash. However, it seems things are changing. With the rebranding effort, the company plans to invest heavily in growing its agent network and users as well.
Mobile Banking has been seeing a steep growth in recent time. Bangladesh accounts for more than 8% of total mobile money accounts globally. More than 12 companies now offer mobile money services on the market. We have also seen a rise in standalone mobile wallet services launched in collaboration with mobile money services like Pay 365, Payza and couple more.
Mobile money transaction rose 53% last year. In 2015 alone mobile phone transaction was BDT 157,773.31, rose from BDT 103,155.37 crore in 2014. The number is more than half of the country’s national budget.
The average monthly transactions made through mobile wallets stood at more than BDT 13,147.77 crore in 2015, which was just BDT 8,596.28 crore a year ago. According to Bangladesh Bank, there are approximately 3.1 crore mobile wallet accounts, of which 1.25 crore is active.
Mobile has huge potential in Bangladesh. Smartphone penetration is growing rapidly making it a ubiquitous device and handing enormous power to the common people. This means mobile money will have many more usages in the coming years. With the renewed investment from the DBBL, we may see a change in the space.
