Bangladesh Bank has requested the foreign ministry to provide information of five foreign sponsor shareholders of Nagad Digital Bank PLC.
The five shareholder companies are the Blue Heaven Ventures LLC, Osiris Capital Partners LLC, Zen Fintech LLC, Finclusion Ventures Pte Ltd and Trupay Technologies LLC.
In a letter on Sunday, the central bank made the request to collect information regarding the companies through Bangladesh embassies in the United States and Singapore.
The information should be included the companies鈥� registration and address, ownership and institutional structures, business activities, current owners and their citizenship, net profits and net assets聽 of the past three years and activities of their subsidiaries.
On June 3, the central bank approved a banking licence for Nagad Digital Bank PLC, the first full-fledged digital bank in Bangladesh and a sister concern of mobile financial service provider Nagad, and listed it as a scheduled bank.
A digital bank, also known as an online bank, is a financial institution that operates primarily or exclusively through digital channels such as websites and mobile apps rather than physical branches.
Digital banks are popular for their flexibility, lower fees, and the convenience of managing finances from anywhere at any time.
The BB, however, in a separate notification, provided an exemption from provision 14(ka) of the Bank Company Act, 1991 (amended in 2023) regarding the holding of a substantial volume of shares in a bank by any person or entity.
The rules state, 鈥楴o individual, institution, company, or members of the same family shall be allowed to concentrate ownership of a bank鈥檚 shares. Furthermore, no individual, institution, company, or family members shall directly or indirectly, individually or jointly with others, purchase more than 10 per cent of the shares of any bank.鈥�
The notification clarified that this provision of the Bank Company Act, 1991 would not apply to Blue Heaven Ventures LLC, Orisis Capital Partners LLC, and Finclusion Ventures Pte Ltd.
On October 22, 2023, the Nagad Digital Bank and the Kori Digital received letters of intent from the Bangladesh Bank to launch full-fledged digital banks.