e-KYC: a much-needed impetus for improving bKash’s current registration method

Abstract

In the ever-changing world of technology, the attempt to redefine existing processes into a faster and more efficient version of it, is the goal. The world of finance is not without that thought as well now, because more and technologies are being applied to make everything more accessible and more operational than ever before. Finance and banking is not only in the grasp of the upper income class of society anymore as now the focus has shifted to push for more inclusion rather than exclusion. As a result, more and more efforts are being put in to include the lower income classes of society as well. One of the champions of that movement in Bangladesh have been bKash Limited. One of the most promising companies to have been developed in Bangladesh, bKash have garnered international attention and acclaim for the initiatives they brought forward to introduce mobile financial services into the country. Being the pioneer of mobile banking into the country was not enough to bKash, as they wanted to strive forward with the vision of becoming the pinnacle of mobile finance of the country and then, if possible, move towards the other countries of the world. While they have certainly reached the top of the mobile financial services industry of Bangladesh, they will need to keep looking to find ways to improve upon their existing framework to stay relevant in Bangladesh’s market and if they seriously consider themselves to be good enough to challenge international players. A major step towards that could be the implementation of a new and improved customer registration process called e-KYC which is the electronic version of the KYC (Know Your Customer) process that bKash is currently using. By doing away with the manual input required on part of both the customers and bKash, electronic real time verification of new customers would not only make the procedure much, much faster but also make the entire network more secure for existing customers. This will also allow bKash to be confident about the transparency of its customer base while protecting itself from being a target of fraudulent and illegal activities. The purpose of this paper is to show what both existing and potential customers and the employees of bKash perceive about the existing KYC process of bKash and how theory and evidence from the countries who have implemented the e-KYC procedure show the legitimacy of e-KYC claims of being better than KYC.