How BRAC Bank strengthens its remittance network
Shamsul Arefin from Kishoreganj, working for a construction business in Penang, Malaysia, wanted to send some money home for his sister’s wedding. Shamsul says: “I dispatched the amount in time, but unfortunately, my family received the money after the wedding was over.”
Thousands of Bangladesh’s migrant workers like Shamsul, often called remittance warriors, have had similar experiences when sending money to Bangladesh was an arduous task. Sometimes, it took more than a month. Usually, the money had reached the beneficiaries when the need was over.
Bangladeshis travel to far-away lands in search of work and income. Hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshi youths are employed as migrant workers worldwide. It is they who send their hard-earned money to their families as remittance and keep the country’s economy up and running.
The more the process of sending money is made more accessible, the more it is beneficial for Bangladesh’s remittance warriors and the economy. As cross-border payments are always complex, involving multiple payment service providers such as exchange houses, banks, mobile wallets, etc., the process has to be ready to use at the individual level.
As every country has its own payment infrastructure, policy framework, and guidelines, sometimes too many intermediate steps while transferring money may take a long time to reach at the beneficiary level.
BRAC Bank has worked tirelessly in the past decade to build a network of more than 65 partners worldwide, from Middle East, Southeast, Asia-Pacific, US, UK and other European countries and Africa to make the lives of the remittance senders and their families easy. At present, each and every Bangladeshi in any corner of the world can easily send money through BRAC Bank.
The bank’s partners are helping significantly. Payment operators such as Western Union, MoneyGram, Ria, World Remit, and many are working with BRAC Bank in complete confidence.
According to regulations, an individual cannot just send money through one of these operators. A bank in Bangladesh has to connect with a payment operator for disbursing the money.
N & P Japan Co. Ltd is very popular among Bangladeshis living in Japan. However, they could not send remittance through them as it did not have any bank as a partner back home. BRAC Bank teamed up with N & P Japan Co. Ltd, and now all Bangladeshis in Japan can use its services to send money home where close to one lakh Bangladeshi expatriates are living.
However, partnerships may not be enough. The migrants also need remittance to transfer faster. BRAC Bank employs state-of-the-art technology to address this problem. It developed an ‘API Connectivity’ with each payment partner that allows two partners to instantly transfer funds without any human intervention.
This technology has made life easy. Abu Naser from Dubai says: “My brother in Bangladesh has an account with BRAC Bank and I remit from Dubai to his account whenever he needs, just like a local fund transfer. This is something I could only dream of a few years ago, but thanks to BRAC Bank for making our lives easier.”