On 15 March 2026, Bangladesh Bank did something overdue. It replaced a credit card guideline gathering dust since 2004 — raising the unsecured limit to Tk20 lakh, allowing up to Tk40 lakh against collateral, capping interest at 25 per cent, and setting cash withdrawal at 50 per cent of the credit limit. On the surface, a routine regulatory update. Looked at against where Bangladesh stands in the global payments landscape, it is the opening move in a far larger game — one the country has been too cautious to play.
The numbers invite both optimism and sobering reflection. Domestic credit card transactions rose 48 per cent between March 2023 and November 2025. Card transactions overall surged 143 per cent in five years to Tk50,044 crore. Yet of the 5.28 crore cards in circulation, only 28 lakh are credit cards — a penetration rate of 1.6 per cent in a population of 17.5 crore. The world average sits at 22.26 per cent. Bangladesh is not running behind the global pace. It is barely on the track.
When pressed to explain this gap, banks reach instinctively for the same answer: risk. That answer is not wrong, but it is profoundly incomplete. By September 2025, non-performing loans had reached Tk6.44 trillion — 35.73 per cent of all distributed credit, the highest ratio in the world, exceeding even war-torn Ukraine. But the origins of that crisis matter enormously. The bad loans were driven by large conglomerates borrowing hundreds of crores through politically connected relationships, not by consumers swiping cards at supermarkets. Projecting that corporate catastrophe onto small-ticket revolving credit is not risk management. It is a category error with a measurable cost.
The credit card product is architecturally different from the loans that broke Bangladesh’s banking sector. It is individually capped, algorithmically underwritten, and monitored in near real time. When a borrower misses a payment, the system flags it within days, not quarters. Alternative data — salary deposits, MFS activity, transaction history — gives banks a granular, current picture of repayment capacity that traditional methods cannot match. The two products are not versions of the same risk. They are different animals entirely.
What gives Bangladesh a genuine structural advantage is the digital infrastructure it has built without fully connecting the dots. Bangladesh Bank has issued Letters of Intent to five private credit bureau companies — backed by TransUnion, bKash, City Bank, and international technology firms — chosen from 22 applications. bKash alone has 8 crore users largely invisible to the existing Credit Information Bureau, which covers only formal bank borrowers. When a garment worker’s bKash payment consistency, utility bill history, and mobile recharge patterns translate into a credit score, the risk conversation transforms entirely. A salary deposit trail becomes a credential. Transaction frequency becomes a proxy for financial discipline.
Prepaid cards surged 751 per cent between December 2021 and July 2025 — the fastest-growing segment, reflecting genuine appetite. But prepaid cards build no credit histories and offer no purchasing power to bridge cash flow gaps. Meanwhile, the distribution model for credit cards remains anchored to a narrow segment: department stores capture 48.9 per cent of total domestic credit card spending. A credit card economy designed around Dhaka’s retail chains is not a national payments strategy. It is a product of inertia.
The rural dimension is where the real scale lies. Bangladesh spends an estimated Tk20,000 crore annually maintaining cash infrastructure — resources that could be redirected towards health, education, and social protection. The architecture for bridging the rural gap already exists: Bangla QR, NPSB interoperability, agent banking, and MFS networks where over 80 per cent of outlets serve rural communities. The question is whether credit access will follow the infrastructure that has already reached these communities.
The Islamic finance frontier remains almost entirely unexplored. Nearly 90 per cent of Bangladesh’s population is Muslim, yet Shariah-compliant card products remain poorly designed for younger consumers. The new guideline addresses this — Shariah-compliant banks will charge fees and profit rates rather than interest. The regulatory space now exists. What remains is the institutional imagination to build a seamless, mobile-first product that a young Muslim professional outside Dhaka would actually want to use.
The new guideline replaces a framework written before smartphones, e-commerce, or MFS existed. That alone makes it progress. But the real measure of this moment will be whether Bangladesh’s banks use it — combined with credit bureau data, eKYC, and MFS transaction histories — to extend revolving credit to the millions who have proven their creditworthiness through years of digital behaviour, but have never been asked to prove it.
A 1.6 per cent penetration rate in a country of 175 million is not a ceiling. It is an indictment of the status quo. The policy architecture to change it is falling into place. The only remaining question is whether the banks will lead — or mistake yesterday’s corporate lending failures for tomorrow’s retail credit risks.
The author is a digital transformation and fintech strategist focused on financial inclusion, platform innovation, and emerging markets.
