One of the leading banks in Bangladesh, HSBC launched a business plan competition for undergraduate students yesterday. The contest, Young Entrepreneur Award (YEA) 2011, aims at promoting "creativity and innovation and sharpen the business knowledge of young students beyond their borders". "YEA will harness creative ideas and provide real-life exposure to the future entrepreneurs of the country," said Sanjay Prakash, chief executive officer of HSBC in Bangladesh, at the launch at Sonargaon Hotel in Dhaka.

The procedure for taking part in the contest is very easy. Any interested team of two to three members can take part in the contest by submitting a business plan on the YEA website, www.asiayea.com, by February 10. Seven teams will be allowed to present their plans to a panel of experts after passing through two levels of screening and workshops on entrepreneurial skills and knowledge, said a statement. The best team will get Tk 75,000 as prize money. The second and third best teams will be awarded Tk 45,000 and Tk 35,000 respectively.

All the three teams will participate in a study tour in Hong Kong where the winner will compete in the regional grand finale in June. YEA's winners from Hong Kong, Malaysia, Thailand, Shanghai, Philippines and Brunei will also participate in the finale.

News: The Daily Star/Bangladesh/20 Jan 2011

NCC Bank has taken various initiatives to increase inflows of remittances through banking channels. In this regard, additional managing director of the bank Golam Hafiz Ahmed, along with head of remittance & NRB services department ABM Jashim Uddin Ahamed visited Italy recently as a part of motivational programme to inspire Bangladeshi expatriates, said a press release.

During the visit, they highlighted various attractive schemes of the bank designed for Bangladeshi expatriates and requested them to send money through banking channels. To facilitate easy and faster remittance to Bangladesh, they have met officials of different exchange companies in Italy. During their stay at Italy, Golam Hafiz Ahmed and ABM Jashim Uddin Ahamed paid a courtesy visit to Bangladesh Embassy and discussed the matter with Masud Bin Monem, Bangladesh embassador to Italy.

News: Daily Sun/ Bangladesh/ Jan-20-2011

The central bank has provided more fund to the state-run Investment Corporation of Bangladesh (ICB) to bring back stability in the share market, officials said.

Bangladesh Bank (BB) has disbursed a total of Tk 4.0 billion to the ICB through IFIC bank in the last two consecutive days to avert any massive slide.

"We've provided the fund to the ICB as short term loan," a BB senior official told the FE Tuesday, adding that the central bank would inject more fund as per the market requirement.

On Sunday, the BB sanctioned a fresh loan to the ICB amounting to Tk 2.0 billion, which was disbursed on Monday.

The BB further injected fresh fund worth Tk 2.0 billion to the ICB Tuesday as trading in both bourses was halted by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for the second time in eight days.

With 80 minutes remaining in Tuesday's trading session, the benchmark index of the Dhaka Stock Exchange, generally known as DGEN, was down by 3.29 per cent or 243 points when trading was suspended.

Earlier on Monday last week, the SEC suspended trading within the opening fifty minutes of trade when DGEN was down by 9.0 per cent or 660 points.

"We'll take all measures to bring back stability in the capital market," an ICB senior official told the FE, adding that the ICB is purchasing shares actively to inspire the investors and boost their confidence.

News: The Financial Express/ Bangladesh/ Jan-19-2011

Bangladesh Bank Governor Dr. Atiur Rahman has attributed the resilience of the Bangladesh economy, against the onslaught of the recent global crisis, to the adoption of limited and regulated external exposure. “The limited, regulated external exposure served well in shielding our financial markets and institutions from the debacle caused by the contagious global crisis.
“The financial system in Bangladesh remains unscathed by the crisis, and well-poised to support the recovery of the real sector from weakening demand in the traditional Western export markets,” said Dr Rahman, while addressing a high-level meeting on better supervision of financial transactions, as well as better banking in a post-crisis era at Kuala Lumpur.
Economists and central bank governors from different countries attended the meeting, which was jointly organized by the Financial Stability Institute and Executives’ Meeting of East Asia-Pacific.
The Bangladesh Bank Governor said that Bangladesh is keeping track of developments in supervisory approaches and techniques stipulated by the Basel accords, apart from other regional groupings.
He said that being a developing market, in addition to a supervisory regime, with other more advanced peers ahead in the learning curve, enables the country’s banking sector to learn from implementation glitches and pitfalls faced elsewhere.
Banks in Bangladesh are now busy adjusting themselves properly to the Basel II capital regime (mandatory from 2010), and its attendant risk rating and risk management structures. Basel III capital requirement enhancements will be phased in duly. Regular stress testing has been introduced mandatorily to bring out vulnerabilities in banks.
Dr. Atiur said that they are looking forward to the revised global standards of fair value accounting, although tradable securities as yet do not comprise very significant parts of asset books in Bangladeshi banks.
“Our banking institutions are as yet nowhere near assuming global “too big to fail” or “too important to fail” stature; for branches of large global banks in Bangladesh, we expect cooperation and access to pertinent supervisory information from home country supervisors.”
Dr. Atiur observed that despite very elegant supervisory structures covering such aspects, “We hear about mature financial markets in advanced economies like USA and UK, failing to finance SMEs adequately or on affordable terms, while we do not hear about similar financing difficulty for activities of questionable merit like speculation and leveraged buyout of equity.”
He observed that although qualitative global best practice norms are working well in combating money laundering and terrorism financing, there appears to be no reason why this should not work in attaining better allocations for financing, eliminating pockets of exclusion of positive growth sources, and instead delineating new exclusion areas for questionable and potentially destabilizing activities.
The Bangladesh Bank Governor said that in Bangladesh qualitative promotion of financial inclusion, alongside discouragement of speculative, wasteful and nonessential use of credit resources have already been in service for quite a while already.
Dr Atiur Rahman is due to return home this evening from Malaysia.

News: The Independent /Bangladesh/19 Jan 2011

The government will sign a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the commercial banks for introducing electronic government procurement (e-GP) mechanism as the system requires electronic payment facilities.

Initially, the MoU will be signed with 12 banks by the end of this month and by turn all other banks will be tied up with the system in a bid to ensure accountability and transparency in the government procurement.

It was decided at a meeting between the Central Procurement Technical Unit (CPTU) and the commercial banks along with the central bank at the conference room of the Implementation Monitoring and Evaluation Division (IMED) in the city yesterday.

IMED secretary Habib Ullah Majumder presided over the meeting organised by the CPTU.

CPTU Director General Amulya Kumar Debnath, Bangladesh Bank Executive Director Nazneen Sultana, CPTU Director Aziz Taher Khan, representatives from 12 banks and other officials were present at the meeting.

The CPTU made a presentation at the meeting on e-payment options for introducing the e-GP system. The representatives of the banks discussed about their existing system, capacity and involvement in the process of introducing the e-payment system.

The officials said that all the banks do not have the same capacity and system for such operation. So, it has to be sorted out between the banks and CPTU.

Bangladesh Bank representative suggested that the banks individually would fix a reasonable service charge for tenders following their bank guidelines.

The meeting decided that the banks would expedite their preparation for this and CPTU would hold further discussions with them to finalise the MoU and technical, and management issues as soon as possible.

The CPTU is implementing the Public Procurement Reform Project-II (PPRP-II) supported by the World Bank. Introducing e-GP on pilot basis in four target agencies such as LGED, REB, WDB and RHD is one of the four components of the PPRP-II, sources said.

After success of the pilot project, the system will be introduced at all ministries and divisions by June this year to ensure efficient, effective and transparent public bidding procedures.

News: Daily Sun /Bangladesh/19 Jan 2011