Bangladesh Bank (BB) on Saturday launched the web portal, Digital Map of Financial Services in Bangladesh at a function at the BB Training Academy. 

The map includes geographic information of bank branches, ATMs, agents, and other financial access points across the country. Bangladesh Bank Governor Atiur Rahman launched the web portal.

This project was sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, facilitated by BB and Microcredit Regulatory Authority,

and implemented by a specialist firm Brand Fusion who hired local data collectors to go around Bangladesh over a six-month period earlier this year.

Speaking on the launch of the programme Atiur said the map would help us to generate information and analyse the financial access points and would eventually be a great value to the commercial sector.

“This new tools can complement our new Integrated Supervision System which is our new electronic portal which allows us to monitor many aspects of the financial sector both at the aggregate macro level as well as zoom into branch level data,” the governor said.

Besides, he said this new financial mapping tool to be used by both BB and the Microfinance Regulatory Authority (MRA) in making balanced and sound policy and regulatory decisions. 

For example BB staff can use this when giving bank branch permissions and also when determining the appropriate balance of branch, ATM, agent and other point of service.