The 800th board meeting of Pubali Bank Ltd was held at its head office in the city yesterday.

Hafiz Ahmed Mazumder MP, chairman of board of directors of the bank, presided over the meeting, said a press release.

Vice-Chairman and Director Habibur Rah-man, Managing Director Helal Ahmed Chowdhury, among others, were present at the meeting.

Source: Daily Sun

United Commercial Bank Limited (UCB), a lfirst generation private commercial bank, opened its 101st branch at Dampara in Chittagong yesterday.

Akhtaruzzaman howdhury (Babu), MP and sponsor director of UCB, inaugurated the branch while M Jahangir Alam Khan, chairman of the bank’s Audit Committee, among other directors, were present.

In the speech, Chowdhury, also the chairman of the Standing Committee for Textile and Jute Ministry, expressed his gratitude to the clients, businessmen, well-wishers and local communities of the port city.

M Shahjahan Bhuiyan, managing director of the bank, explained UCB’s commitment towards its service quality.

Source: Daily Sun

Standard Bank Ltd has opened its 56th branch at Patuakhali recently.

Chairman of the Bank Kazi Akramuddin Ahmed inaugurated the branch at Sadar Road of the district town, said a press release.

S.A. Farooqui, managing director, Alauddin Al-Azad, deputy managing director of the bank and local business personalities were present on the occasion.

While speaking at the function, Kazi Akramuddin Ahmed said Standard Bank has been able to achieve steady growth maintaining high ethical standard of banking by extending modern and prompt banking facilities to its clients.

He also said the newly opened branch is directly connected with the centralized real-time on-line banking network as a result of which any client of Patuakhali will be able to transact with other branches of the bank located throughout the country.

Source: Daily Sun

DHAKA, DEC 22: Almost most half of the 25 institutions have so far formed separate entities in line with central bank and securities regulator order to be expired on December 31. The move was aimed at restructuring operations of brokerage and merchant banking firms to protect the interests of stock market investors.
The deadline was extended for the fifth time since March, with the regulators last deadline expiring on November 30.
 The Bangladesh Bank and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has reset December 31 as the deadline to give banks, financial institutions and insurance companies involved in stock business more time to set up separate companies.
Institutions, including AB Bank, Prime Bank, Mutual Trust Bank, Islami Bank, Trust Bank, EXIM Bank, Janata Bank, Agrani Bank, Sonali Bank, Southeast Bank and Prime Finance and Investment Ltd, have so far separated their brokerage and merchant banking arms.
More than 25 institutions, most of them banks, are running a stock brokerage business in addition to their core business.
 “We extended the deadline several times for practical reasons. It’s time-consuming to get registration for opening a new business,” said an SEC official Wednesday.
A top official of the non-banking financial institutions (NBFIs), on condition of anonymity, said, “We welcome the move but it is a very tough job to form separate companies. We need more time.”
Mostly NBFIs had failed to form subsidiary companies within the deadline set by the regulator.
On October 16, the SEC, in its last directive, said, “If banks, NBFIs and insurers fail to comply by November 30, they will be barred from offering credit facilities to share market investors from December 01."
In December 2009, the SEC ordered them to separate their merchant banking and stock brokerage units from the core business by March 2010.
The official noted that the subsidiary companies would have to comply existing and new rules and regulations introduced by SEC to run their merchant banking business and stock dealing activities properly.

Source:The Independent

Bangladesh will enter a full-fledged mobile banking network within the next three months, and the shift will be implemented within a bank-led model, the central bank governor said yesterday.

"The upcoming mobile banking has to be led by the banks," Atiur Rahman said at a discussion at the National Press Club in Dhaka.

The model will ensure proper regulatory monitoring and transparency in the related transaction processes and help reach banking services to the grassroots, he said.

The discussion on 'financial inclusion and impact of ICT' was organised by NeoSTAR Alliance, an association of the students of American International University-Bangladesh.

"Already we have given licences to a number of banks towards that goal and a few banks have started their operations," the governor said.

He called upon the telecom operators to give the banks access to their USSD (unstructured supplementary service data) networks soon so both the sectors can communicate with each other.

"The telecom operators will be encouraged to form partnership with the banks under the mobile banking system but they themselves will not be the bankers," he added.

Chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee for the Ministry of Post and Telecommunications Hasanul Haq Inu stressed reducing the bandwidth price to less than Tk 10,000 to easily bring the rural people under connectivity.

He also emphasised collaboration between banks, telecom companies, regulators and content developers to build a strong domestic ICT base.

President of the Association of Mobile Telecom Operators of Bangladesh Zakiul Islam proposed a 'hybrid model' for the upcoming mobile banking where 'both banks and mobile operators will have an equal role'.

Source: The Daily Star