Over the past decade, Bangladesh has made impressive progress in digital financial services. More than 90 million active mobile financial service accounts are now in use, processing around 22 million transactions worth nearly Tk 6,000 crore on an average day. People regularly cash in and cash out at agent points, send money, receive salaries and government benefits, recharge mobile phones, and pay utility bills.
Yet walk into any grocery store or pharmacy, and the picture changes completely. Digital payments for everyday retail purchases have lagged far behind other financial use cases. Cash still accounts for more than 98% of retail transactions in Bangladesh. Money enters the digital system daily, but much of it is cashed out again before it is ever spent. Customers pay a cash-out charge just to withdraw their own money, merchants go back to carrying and counting notes at the end of the day, and the country loses the efficiency it has worked so hard to build across the digital financial system. The last mile - the actual moment of paying for groceries, medicine or a meal - has stayed almost entirely analogue.
Bangladesh Bank has recognised this gap and is now working with renewed urgency to popularise Bangla QR, the country's interoperable QR standard. It allows customers to pay participating merchants through a single, unified QR code, regardless of the bank or wallet used by either party. To support this push and give it a coherent shape, we propose a simple 4P framework: Presence, Performance, Promotion and Pricing.
Presence - Bangla QR should be visible at merchant points across the country, and customers' mobile apps should clearly show the Bangla QR option. Codes need to be displayed prominently at the counter, not tucked away, and the scan option should sit on the home screen of every banking and wallet app rather than buried in a menu.
Performance - payments must work reliably, with a clear success-rate target and fast resolution when they don't. Customers and merchants judge the whole system by what happens at the counter, so failures need to be rare and, when they do happen, resolved within minutes rather than days.
Promotion - once the first two are solid, campaigns and incentives can build the habit of paying by QR. This includes customer and merchant awareness drives, cashback or reward-based incentives, and government institutions leading by example so people see Bangla QR used everywhere they go.
Pricing - over time, the merchant cost needs to come down to a level that makes digital payment genuinely attractive against cash. That means testing real transaction data, comparing it against what merchants pay today, and adjusting rates so cost is never the reason a shop turns away a digital payment.
The sequencing of this work matters. Presence and Performance form the Prepare phase - without these two working properly, the market isn't ready to move forward. Promotion and Pricing then form the Growth phase, where adoption is meant to accelerate.
Presence: real progress since June
On Presence, June brought solid progress. Bangladesh's major providers have now switched their merchants over to Bangla QR - proprietary QR codes that banks and MFS operators used to issue on their own have been replaced with the unified standard, and the change is visible inside the apps themselves. The country already has more than 15 lakh Bangla QR merchants. From 1 July, the government has made a Bangla QR code mandatory for trade licence renewal, which will bring in many more. Banks are also moving: each bank is working to onboard merchants for QR accounts, with individual branches targeting around 100 new merchant accounts each. At this pace, we could see well over 10 lakh additional QR merchants within a few months. On the customer side, the major wallets and banking apps - including bKash and Nagad - have all added a Bangla QR payment option.
Performance: now is the time
to focus here
With Presence advancing, it is time to focus on the second P: Performance. We need to be confident that Bangla QR payments work reliably. If 1,000 customers try to pay at 1,000 different shops today, at least 970 of those payments should succeed - a 97% success rate. If more than 10% of payment attempts fail, customers and merchants will become frustrated and lose confidence in Bangla QR. Once lost, that confidence will be difficult to regain.
Real-time, in-person payments carry a particular kind of pressure that bank transfers don't. Picture a customer paying Tk 3,000 for baby formula for his child. His account is deducted, but the merchant does not receive the payment - and he is told the issue will take three months to resolve. That simply cannot be the standard. When a payment fails after the customer's account has been debited, the funds should be released or refunded automatically within minutes in most cases.
Bangladesh Bank has already introduced a Transaction Status Inquiry (TSI) service for the Bangla QR platform. A provider like bKash can check the status within a minute, and if the merchant's provider confirms the payment was never received, refund the customer immediately. This needs to be monitored daily - how many such cases occur, and how quickly they are resolved. Done properly, TSI should be able to resolve the vast majority of these cases automatically within three minutes.
Growth phase: promotion and pricing
Once Presence and Performance are solid, we should expect a major jump in cashless transactions. This is when campaigns should begin - educating both customers and merchants on the benefits of Bangla QR, and offering incentives for going digital. One idea worth exploring: if micro-merchants could process their everyday Tk 200-300 transactions at no cost, it could meaningfully increase transaction volumes at exactly the level where cash is hardest to displace.
On pricing, we may operate and observe Bangla QR for two to three months before revisiting the numbers. For many low-margin merchants, an MDR of 1% may still be too high. Over time, stakeholders should work together to bring the MDR closer to 0.5%. Three months of operating data-covering transaction patterns, merchant costs and provider revenue-should provide a sound basis for designing a fairer and more sustainable pricing structure.
The government's push on Bangla QR is timely. If we execute the 4P framework - Presence and Performance first, then Promotion and Pricing - we can turn this into a genuine shift in how Bangladesh pays. That means more digital transactions, deeper financial inclusion, greater economic empowerment for ordinary people, and faster overall economic growth.
Shahadat Khan, Ph.D., is the Founder and CEO of TallyKhata and TallyPay.
