Last week, I met a founder I assumed was pitching another fintech start-up. Ten minutes in, I realised he was describing something more consequential — a quiet social experiment already changing lives.
His company, MyKisti, finances smartphones on easy instalments for Indigenous families, farmers, women entrepreneurs and day labourers in Lama, Bandarban, in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. No collateral. No formal credit history. Small monthly payments, immediate access to a device.
What they’re really financing is opportunity. The founder told me his customers now check weather forecasts before heading to their fields, get agricultural advice and sell produce — much of it organic — through social media and digital marketplaces instead of to middlemen. Then he told me something that made me pause: the repayment default rate among his Indigenous customers is zero.
I can’t independently verify that figure, and readers shouldn’t take it on faith either. But if it holds, it challenges an assumption our entire industry is built on. For decades, we have asked whether vulnerable communities are bankable. Perhaps it is time we asked whether our financial products are designed for the realities of their lives.
Years in digital banking have taught me we underestimate what a smartphone represents. We classify it as a consumer device when it has become productive infrastructure. A phone entering a low-income household rarely changes one person’s life — a farmer gains access to market prices, a student gains an online classroom, an entrepreneur gains customers beyond the village, all through the same device, at the same time. That’s platform economics in its most literal form: every additional person connected makes the ecosystem more valuable for the next, and value compounds fastest in households that have had none of it until now.
It also sits close to the spirit of Islamic finance — value created through real productive activity, not debt extended for its own sake. This is what impact financing should look like: capital measured not only by return, but by the livelihoods and resilience it creates.
Bangladesh isn’t the first to discover this. Kenya’s Safaricom and M-Kopa built financing around the value of the device itself, reaching more than two million customers traditional banks had written off. Once those phones arrived, mobile money did the rest — Kenya’s M-Pesa network lifted roughly 194,000 households out of poverty over six years, with the sharpest gains among women. India built inclusion into national infrastructure by design; UPI now carries close to half the world’s real-time payment volume. Vietnam, whose cash-reliant economy resembles ours, built trust through human agents before asking anyone to go digital. Three different starting points, one shared conclusion: digital inclusion begins with access, deliberately extended to the people furthest from it.
Bangladesh already has most of the pieces these countries once lacked — mobile financial services embedded in daily life, a maturing Bangla QR standard and agent banking reaching where branches cannot. The question isn’t whether the infrastructure exists. It’s whether we’re directing it towards the people who need it most.
The Hill Tracts are among Bangladesh’s most exposed communities — geographically isolated, thinly banked and increasingly vulnerable to climate risk. Here, a smartphone isn’t a convenience. It’s a weather warning before the rains come, a market beyond the local one and a classroom that didn’t exist before. Technology, in this context, is resilience. For communities on the front line of climate change, digital connectivity is no longer simply about convenience — it is about preparedness, adaptation and survival.
This is precisely the kind of initiative development finance was designed to support. Bangladesh Bank has championed financial inclusion for years. Digital Bangladesh and Smart Bangladesh have the policy scaffolding in place. Agent banking networks and Bangla QR rails already reach these districts for other purposes. What’s usually missing isn’t funding, or even infrastructure. It’s the deliberate act of connecting the two — directing existing concessional financing towards small, proven, community-rooted models like this one before they need to become big enough to be noticed.
We often ask how Bangladesh can build a smarter economy. The answer may not begin in Dhaka, inside another boardroom or policy meeting. It may begin in Lama, Bandarban, with an Indigenous farmer holding a smartphone for the first time — not because someone gave it away, but because someone believed even the poorest citizen deserves access to the digital economy.
Bangladesh’s digital future will not ultimately be judged by how many apps we build or how many QR codes we deploy. It will be judged by whether the people furthest from opportunity are finally brought into the digital economy — and if that future begins anywhere, it may well begin in the hills of Bandarban.
The author is a digital banking and fintech strategist working at the intersection of financial inclusion, platform economics and digital transformation in Bangladesh, and the author of From Cash to Code. Views and opinions expressed in the article are solely those of the author.
