Between 10pm and 3am, a parallel marketplace comes alive across the country. Street vendors serve night-shift workers, rickshaw pullers complete their highest-earning trips, factories change shifts, hospitals operate at full capacity, and wholesale markets unload the food that will feed cities the next day. Billions of Taka change hands every night—almost entirely in cash. There are no POS machines, no QR codes, and no digital trails.
This vast financial ecosystem remains largely invisible to policymakers, yet it is central to how Bangladesh actually functions.
These night-time markets explain why cash continues to dominate despite years of digital finance expansion. They expose a gap between how financial inclusion is imagined and how economic survival actually works. The night economy is where policy meets reality.
At 2:15 am in Kawran Bazar, Nurul Majid finishes unloading his fifth truck. He has earned Tk980 so far—enough to cover basic food expenses and part of his daughter’s school costs if he can manage two more loads before dawn. Around him, nearly 2,000 trucks arrive nightly during peak seasons, according to Dhaka North City Corporation market oversight data and trader associations. Conservative estimates from wholesale committees place nightly transaction volumes at roughly Tk4 to Tk6 crore. Not a single paisa leaves a digital trace.
This is not informal activity at the margins. It is the arterial system of Bangladesh’s urban economy.
If even half of Kawran Bazar’s conservative nightly volume is replicated across Dhaka’s other major wholesale hubs—Gulistan, Mohakhali, Sayedabad, Jatrabari—then Tk500 to Tk800 crore circulating through the city’s night markets every 24 hours becomes a plausible lower-bound estimate rather than speculation. Over a year, this implies cash flows approaching TK200,000 to Tk250,000 crore, consistent with urban consumption and supply-chain data from Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics household expenditure surveys and transport flow estimates.
Overall, cash still accounts for roughly 70 to 75 per cent of transactions in Bangladesh, according to Bangladesh Bank payment system reports. After dark, its dominance becomes nearly absolute. Between 10pm and 5am, digital payment infrastructure effectively shuts down—not because technology fails, but because the system was never designed for these hours or these workers. MFS agents close, banks go offline for batch processing, and millions of registered digital accounts lie dormant while the real economy keeps moving.
The informal sector employs approximately 85 per cent of Bangladesh’s workforce and contributes over 60 per cent of GDP, as consistently reported by the ILO and national labour surveys. Much of this activity peaks at night: garment factories changing shifts, construction materials delivered to avoid congestion, food vendors serving 24-hour industries, and transport workers completing daily earnings. These workers operate in temporal and spatial zones where formal finance has chosen not to exist.
Cash rules after dark not out of habit, but out of necessity. Liquidity preference here is not about convenience; it is about survival.
When a rickshaw puller ends his shift at 11pm with Tk800, his needs are immediate. He must pay the garage owner or lose tomorrow’s rental. He must buy food from the only shop still open. He must set aside school fees before the money dissolves into daily expenses. He needs instant liquidity, universal acceptance, zero transaction cost, and absolute certainty. Cash delivers all four. Digital payments, as currently designed, do not.
This is not technophobia. It is rational economic behaviour in response to structural exclusion.
A street food vendor operating on a 15 to 20 per cent margin on a 30-taka meal cannot absorb a 1.5 per cent transaction fee without losing profit, a reality confirmed by microenterprise margin studies conducted by BRAC and PPRC. A delayed or failed transaction at midnight means lost sales and lost trust. When cash-out points close early, money trapped in digital wallets becomes unusable precisely when working capital is most needed.
These constraints explain why informal workers have built sophisticated financial networks outside formal systems. Trust-based liquidity management—emergency pooling, rotating credit, overnight advances—often outperforms formal banking in responsiveness. This is not primitive economics; it is efficient risk management built on reputation, proximity, and reciprocity.
During the internet disruptions of 2024, digital payment channels stalled. Informal networks did not. Earnings fell, but consumption did not collapse, because cash and trust-based credit continued to function. Resilience, it turns out, still lives outside formal finance.
What fintech and policy have consistently overlooked is that Bangladesh’s digital financial services were designed for a daytime, salaried, documented economy. Even as digital transaction volumes grow on dashboards, the system stops exactly where the country’s real economy begins—on the street, at night.
The government aims to digitise 75 per cent of transactions by 2027. This target is economically incoherent unless it addresses the conditions that make cash not a preference but a necessity. Bangladesh is estimated to lose over 200,000 crore taka annually in potential tax revenue due to cash-based informality, according to National Board of Revenue gap analyses, yet invests little in understanding why informal workers rationally choose cash over systems that impose cost, delay, and risk.
The comparison with India’s UPI system is instructive. UPI succeeded because transactions are effectively free, subsidised by the state as digital public infrastructure. Bangladesh’s ecosystem imposes costs at multiple points—withdrawals, transfers, merchant payments. For workers earning Tk300 to Tk500 a day, these costs materially reduce purchasing power.
The solution is not forced digitisation. Cash provides resilience, particularly during political instability or technological failure. The goal should be optionality—allowing workers to move between cash and digital based on advantage, not constraint.
Building digital finance for the night economy requires rethinking design assumptions. Infrastructure must operate 24 hours, not 9 to 5. Transaction costs must fall low enough for Tk20 items to be sold digitally. Digital-to-cash liquidity must be available when workers need it. Targeted subsidies for informal transactions would cost far less than the billions spent annually on printing, transporting, and securing physical currency.
Back in Kawran Bazar, dawn breaks as Nurul completes his seventh load. He earns Tk1,500 not ideal, but enough. Around him, traders count stacks of cash before the market briefly rests. By morning, the produce he helped unload will be feeding families across Dhaka who will never see the invisible economy that made their breakfast possible.
The question is not whether digital payments will replace cash. They should not, and they will not. The real question is whether Bangladesh can design financial systems intelligent enough to coexist with the economy that already exists—one that works at night, runs on thin margins, and values certainty over abstraction. Until then, billions will continue to move every night beyond the reach of digital ambition, not because the economy is informal, but because it is rational.
The author is a digital banking and fintech strategist focused on financial inclusion, literacy, innovation, and platform strategy.
