The advent of digital payments and a new avenue of financing for consumers in Bangladesh

Abstract

My internship period at IPDC Finance has been both an extraordinary and humbling experience. I got the opportunity to work in the retail department at IPDC and was blessed with an amazing line manager who trusted in my ability as an individual and allowed to me function as a full time employee. I worked in the merchant acquisition team for IPDC EZ which is an innovative product set to change how we view financing in the consumer white goods sector. Digital payment has been slowly gaining popularity among the masses in our country but a massive untapped market was up for grabs. This market was the EMI or installment market which is currently being tapped only by credit cards. However if we look at Bangladesh’s scenario, out of the 17 million people who have bank accounts only 0.75 million people have credit cards which is absolutely miniscule thus leaving a massive 16.25 million market up for grabs. IPDC EZ essentially is a digital form of loans; almost like microfinance which consumers can opt to take even without having credit cards and can avail the benefit of installments. Currently in our market, in order to get the facility of installments, one need to have a credit card which is quite difficult to get for young executives who recently enrolled in an organization and additionally a credit card is quite expensive to maintain. Credit cards also block the amount of money you can utilize once an EMI is activated so there are drawbacks in using credit cards for availing the EMI facility. Essentially making the whole 17 million market up for grabs to dominate for IPDC Finance. This was a smart and innovative move for IPDC as there are no real competitors in the market to rival the reach that IPDC EZ has and the only thing that comes close to it are the credit cards of banks. In my 3 months duration at IPDC Finance as an intern, I have successfully managed to onboard 9 merchants into IPDC EZ. Some of the large ones are Samsung, Istore, Nitol Electronics, Oppo etc. It was a truly wonderful experience overall as I got to work and experience firsthand on how to barter and convince companies to use our module of finance to sell their products to the consumers. Even though IPDC EZ is a new product but there is great promise for the product as the market response thus far has been quite promising and this mode of financing is especially effective in a middle income country like Bangladesh where people have big dreams and spend heavily but simply require a helping hand in the financing of their dreams.