Bangladesh Bank governor Ahsan H Mansur on Tuesday said that depositors of weak banks will soon get their deposits back.
He made the comments while speaking at the Microcredit Regulatory Authority report release ceremony on the microfinance situation in Bangladesh at the CIRDAP auditorium in the capital on Tuesday.
鈥楾he money will be refunded in phases,鈥� he said.
鈥榃e will rescue you, but it will take time. We have to give time for that. We are moving towards the Bank Resolution Act, some banks have to be merged. We will try to solve this issue within this year, and give you back your deposits,鈥� he added.
The governor said that he had been advising people for the last 10 years to not deposit money in S Alam鈥檚 banks.
鈥楬owever, for greed of 2 per cent more interest they offered, people deposited their money in those banks,鈥� he said.
About the microfinance situation in the country, the central bank governor said that that the next years will bring more challenges to the microfinance institutions.
鈥楥urrently, there are more than 20,000 branches of microfinance institutions across the country, while banks have about the similar amount of agent banking outlets, which will continue to increase in the next years,鈥� he said.
Highlighting the existence of more than a thousand microfinance institutions in the country, he said that there are no such reasons for so much MFIs.
鈥楾echnological advancements are ongoing. The MFIs have to survive competitively without depending on bail out from the government,鈥� he further said.
Secretary of the financial Institutions Division Nazma Mobarek said, 鈥楤ig investors take loans from banks and some of them become big defaulters. On contrary, microfinance recipients are much better off.鈥�
Md Fazlul Quader, managing director of Palli Karma-Sahayak Foundation said, 鈥楾he number of microfinance recipients is claimed at about 6.4 crore. However, this number will decrease if multiple accounts of one person are combined.鈥�
鈥業t would not be more than 3 crores. We have to review if unsustainable loans are increasing,鈥� he said.
Fazlul Quader also questioned that whether it was needed for 22 government institutions running various types of microfinance programmes.
According to the MRA report, MFIs distributed loans worth Tk聽3 lakh crore to customers in the last fiscal year 2023-24. This is 5.26 per cent more than the previous fiscal year.
It said that out of the total microfinance distributed in the fiscal year 2023-24, loans distributed by MRA-certified microfinance institutions amounted to Tk 2.61 lakh crore.
In addition to distributing microfinance, the institutions have collected deposits of Tk 97,000 crore from customers. Of this, MRA-certified microfinance institutions collected Tk 68,000 crore.
The report said that regular loan of the MFIs were 92 per cent.
Non-performing loan was 8.09 per cent at the end of June 2024, increasing from 5.15 per cent at the end of June 2023.
The report added that 724 MRA-certified institutions had more than 26,000 branches.
The ceremony was chaired by Microcredit Regulatory Authority executive vice-chairman professor Mohammad Helal Uddin.