1.

With dialogue on gender equality and women empowerment taking center stage in policy level
discussions, how important do you think is financial inclusion of women? What Prime Bank plans
to do to facilitate this?

It is extremely important because if we look at the demography obviously the female population
constitutes a very large chunk of it. And when we are talking about banking or if we look at it from a
different perspective which is that saving is one of the major impediments in banking as we promote. So
mostly the women n the family, as the mothers we have seen , since ages they are the prime savers in
the family. The fathers are the spenders and mostly the children are the spenders, so if we look at it
from an organizational point of view we have cost ___(1.02) and the have been kind of savers for the
family. So woman today, they are not only the home makers, they also largely contribute to the
economy. If you look at it from the lowest denominator in the hierarchy of the society even women runs
the workforce, be it the kind of person, a woman who works in the construction site, then if you look at
RMG workforce, and the skilled workforce of the white collar executive class, across all the segments
women constitutes a major part of it. So given that bringing them into the financial net or bringing them
into the banking net is very important. Thing to do. We just can’t think anything to do by excluding the
women of the country. In terms of financial inclusion, in terms of putting the thoughts of banking or
related services, it has to be instilled amongst all sorts of woman across the society.

To be very honest, we have been having a woman banking, not necessarily a woman banking division;
rather we have been having women entrepreneur financing division. That was in a very I would say
humble way that we are doing, for so long. But I can definitely share this thing with you is that, we are at
the verge of launching a fully fledged women banking service within the next couple of months time.
The intention we have there is basically looking at the spectrum of women as I just mentioned a while
back, all across the society – the homemakers, the kitty party goers, the female executives, the RMG
workers – everybody needs to do something or the other with banking. The message that we want to
convey to our female customers is that care for yourself. Women in different roles in society, they take
care of others and they keep forgetting to take care of themselves. So we are going to promote how
one can be taking care of herself. As mentioned we are at the verge of launching it, and without sharing
secrets f the product that we are going to offer, I can tell you that we have instilled few of the features
in female banking which is directly not related to banking services, rather we have looked at the softer
side of the needs or requirements of a female, and also taking into consideration the reality on ground
today on where we stand. Be it mental health support, be it some sort of health services support, these
are the non banking areas that we are going to focus on and offer to the women of the country. We are
trying to work towards the inclusion side because what we have seen mostly that banks who have gone
towards women banking have gone into a niche of the women of the society, mostly they talk about the
high net worth women. So we want to go a step down, and that is also not necessarily only the RMG
workers per say, we want to reach out to the homemakers, who are mostly ignored, but huge in
numbers. They are the ones who are not only making homes, taking care of children; they are fairly
naïve in terms of banking services and how to save. What we have seen is that they are mostly guided
by the men in the house, they don’t have their own say, or their own decision making process, but they
save the money under the pillow or somewhere in the house. So we want to take the banking services
to them, how we will do that is a secret for now. This is what we have in mind to attract these niches out
there, instead of going to the same classes of people.

From the banking industry perspective, is Bangladesh set to embrace the demographic dividend
in the coming years, or does it have the possibility of turning into a demographic liability?

I am very optimistic about it. The demographic dividend is definitely going to be the major force behind
the development of the country. We just cant deny it. If you look at all the other geography’s wherever
the demographic dividend has been the major force they have all reaped the benefit out of it. You can’t
go wrong about it, I don’t know why some critics say that it can be a demographic liability. I am sure we
look at the unemployment rate which is a statistical data, we cant deny that that’s true. The states
responsibility is to facilitate the infrastructure. I cans ee in last 10 – 12 years the revolution that we have
seen in terms of us as a nation trying to march towards a digital infrastructure in Bangladesh, a lot of
things have happened. All these things that have been happening towards the benefits of the young
population in Bangladesh. If you take the example of Pathao and the other ones, they have given global
players like Uber a run for their money. So the startups that we are seeing are definitely s result of the
demographic dividend that is one of its outcomes. At the same time as I was saying the state needs to
facilitate and create the infrastructure, we are seeing more of digitization at different levels; these are
the steps towards adding benefits to the young population. For me personally, my take is that, definitely
Bangladesh is going to embrace the dividend from the demography and it can only go to the right way.
only issue here is that when you have a very young population, I consider myself to be in the young
bracket as I am in my late forties, what I see is that especially the ones in the 20s-30s, they are very
restless, which needs to be curbed, it needs to be challenged. The responsibility lays with us, the elder
generation as well as the young ones the restless one who needs to calm down in a positive way. They
need to contain their energy and use it as a fuel for the leap frogging, they need to see the world in a
different way, because the nation depends on them, the country’s future depends on them. So they
need to channel their own energy in the right direction as well. It’s a dual responsibility for them and us
as well, and the people around. I don’t think it can go wrong, I am highly optimistic about it, because
they are going to change the face of the country, and it has already been seen in many of the areas.
Even though we always complain about the political system and the beauracracy, you need couple of
generations to change that stuff. I mean if you look at the neighboring country India, their political
system had been like that and in recent times, they, a much older democracy than us, are now no
different than us. In many cases they are possibly worse than us, at least we don’t see people
manhandling someone inside the Parliament, we see that happening in India. We are rather more
decent than them, being a younger democracy. We still have a long way to cover, but we are still on the
positive side.

What is the banking industry doing to adopt the 4IR?

Fourth industrial revolution is a buzz word now. To me all these are marketing gimmicks or people trying
to sell these ideas, make hype about it, and possibly make some money out of it. But all I understand
about this is that technology is going to take over. Everything is going to be tech based and this is what
needs to embraced now. So given the banking industry, no exception, it has gone through its own
evolution, and I always keep telling this both internally and externally, banking is now an FMCG
business. We have to run the banking business just like how Square or Pran sells their product. We have
to go to the customer, we have to create the demand, even if there is no demand, we have to repackage
our product every now and then, we have to occupy the mind shelves of the population out there. That
is exactly what FMCG does. It is no longer okay to expect that people will come to the bank, people need
to save money or take loan, those days are gone because I am sure we all know the thing called fintech.
Other than the fiduciary responsibility of a bank, fintech can offer you the convenience; they can offer
you the technological advancement, so in today’s world that is what people looks forwards to. We don’t
want to go to a bank branch or anything; we want to do anything and everything on our smart phone.
Basically the banking need is very simple, keep the money spend the money, now keeping the money
virtually I can’t keep it, I have to physically store it somewhere, how many times does one go to the bank
to check whether the money is there or not. We take it for granted that at the back end the bank is safe
guarding the money, so that will be taken care of. The maximum thing that we deal with is making
payments, buying movie tickets, buying gifts for people, or making payments at Swapno or Agora, you
know if you look at the lifestyle, what are the things that we do – mostly make payments. So that is
something that fintechs like bkash and others have done, they have made it very easy today. They have
created that ecosystem, and banks have to consider themselves a part of the ecosystem. The more the
bank is going to enrich and expand that ecosystem; it is going to be for the betterment of the banks. So
what we are doing today in the R&D process, is to create more and more channels, create more options
for the customers, to expand that ecosystem and be a part of it.

With the financial industry riding high on the back of the ever expanding fintech innovations,
does Prime Bank consider it a competition, or does it see scope of collaboration with fintech in
the coming years for greater growth?

Not only Prime Bank, no bank in the world can do justice by saying fintech is a competition and I am not
going to shake hands. Fintechs are never going to become banks and vice versa. That is the reason why
fintech has evolved and banks need to synergize with fintech, and make the most out of it. Prime Bank
as I was saying is no exception, we arenot a technology company, we are not Microsoft or Oracle, we are
not in the business of creating or developing softwares or hardwares. So rather we would want a
specialist to do that job, and fintech has breached that gap between a technology company and a
finance company. We can always synergize as I said and we can always be a joint force, through
collaboration we can give more and more convenience and benefits to our clients.

Is digitalization a boon or a problem for the banking industry, especially in the context of
cybersecurity?

Digitization is definitely a great thing for the industry, but every great thing has something associated
with you know ‘ a rose comes with thorns’. Cyber security is a big issue today, not only for the financial
system, not only for the finance industry, I mean for anyone and everyone. US state department also
gets hacked into and they are not in the finance business. This is possibly point debate we can still be
having, yesterday to be honest we were having a debate amongst colleagues, somebody was trying to
suggest that at some point of time machines are going to take over human kind, and I personally don’t
agree with that because it is always the man behind the machine who runs the machine. The machine
can only process data faster than the human brain, but what I am going to do with the data, that the
machine does not decide. It’s the hackers or the evil force who are again part of the human kind, who
tries to abuse the facility, or power. Cyber security is definitely a growing concern,. It is just like when
the computer systems were not there, even if today we look at the physical vault of our banks, they are
also very much vulnerable. I mean we have heard so many stories of bank robberies and stuff. So it is
just a different form of bank robbery and we don’t see this robbery taking place every day, and we don’t
get to get cyber robberies in financial system every day. It happens and we just can’t ignore it, so we just
need to safeguard ourselves as much as possible. So we need to have better guards in place, we need to
have higher boundary walls in place and we need to secure ourselves. The more science and technology
is going to advance, the threat is going to increase. At the same time, the safety measures would also be
increasing at the same pace, if not more.

Prime Bank has been promoting school cricket for the last five years, apart from driving major
CSR initiatives through the Prime Bank Foundation. Why school cricket?

Cricket is almost becoming a second religion in the country. It is the most popular sport as we speak. The
whole population, as we were discussing about the demography dividend, it is a very young population,
so people try to look up to Sakibul Hassan, Tamim iqbal, Ashraffiz, the whole of today’s team. As a part
of the corporate social responsibility, as well as to be innthe center mind of the young population, we
thought cricket could be a good medium. School cricket is definitely the foundation of tomorrows cricket
stars of the country. The live example infront of us today, we just won the under 19 cricket world cup,
four of the first eleven players were from our Prime Bank’s school cricket in the last 3-4 years. So we
take immense pride in that fact that 4 of the players in the squad from us and 2 of them if I am not
wrong, one of them named Rakibul scored 74. We are in a way creating stars for tomorrow’s national
cricket team that is a point for major satisfaction and pride for us. For a sustainable growth of the cricket
team at a national level, it is proven in countries like India and Australia, which it has to start at the root
level. Today’s reality that we have in the Bangladeshi cricket is that the school cricket has not flourished
as much as it should have, but now with the under 19 cricket team’s success, we hear from the
Bangladesh cricket board as well that they are going to focus more and more in the infrastructure of the
cricket and the younger version of the cricket. So, our association with that should continue. We think
that we have earned major satisfaction from this involvement.

Is this open to both male and female students

Currently no, because obviously the schools participating are mostly boy squads. That is a good
suggestion or hint that you have said/given. You see the women school cricket still has not been in play
in Bangladesh. The women cricket team has done well and doing better and better possibly in coming
days, that could be one area where can have a discussion with the cricket board and see if the school
cricket board can be revised into two tier kind of structure.
 What is your take on sustainable banking?

Sustainable banking is again a buzz word. Be it banking or any other business, for the sustainability of
the earth, we all have to approaching towards a sustainable ecosystem. We are not excluded from the
ecosystem, we are part of it, so we all have to work towards that. We as a bank also are trying to work
towards that, we are trying to reduce our reliance on paper based stuff. When we were creating our
mementos or gift items, we are trying to go green as much as possible there. Use more eco-friendly
materials. When we are financing companies, we are looking at options as where green banking can be
promoted. In all aspects of sustainable financing mechanisms or procedures, we are very much aligned.
We are looking at future where we can be more and more engaged in that.

Closing Statement

In context of what we have discussed so far, we discussed things like technology, innovation and the
industrial revolution and everything. The closing statement will be again reiterating on the fact that
technology is going to be the backbone of everything that we do, starting from waking up in the morning
to the moment we go to sleep. Everything and anything is going to be evolving around technology, in
some or other form. From banking perspective, it is going to get more challenging, but it is the banker’s
responsibility to embrace that change as quickly as possible. Be more and more adaptive, and leverage
the strength of the technology, and kind of make the services and products more and more convenient.
Not only in terms of features, but also in terms of availability, in the sense that I can’t just make a
product and put it in the showcase, I need to take it to the end consumer. The more I am going to offer
it to the consumer in the most convenient way, whoever achieves that, is going to be the winner. That is
where technology is going to play a huge role in today’s world. Banking is changing, it has significantly
changed a lot already in the last less than 10 years, and it is going to change at a much faster rate than it
has till now. We all have to brace ourselves, gear up, and be ready for the future. We have to be more
proactive than reactive.