The State of Bangladesh Digital Economy

Bangladesh's digital story has two halves that point in opposite directions. On payments, the country is a global outlier: mobile financial services exceed 200 million registered accounts (239 million as of January 2025, Bangladesh Bank MFS data) and moved about Tk 1.5 lakh crore in a single month (August 2025). On connectivity, it is a laggard: fixed broadband sits near 7.9 subscriptions per 100 people (ITU / World Bank, 2023), about a third of Vietnam's 22.7. ICT service exports of $724.6 million in FY2024-25, up 7.7 percent year-on-year (EPB), are real and growing, but they sit on top of a thin, expensive last mile. The governing thought is falsifiable and specific: at 7.9 fixed broadband per 100, the binding constraint has moved from law and political will to fibre and affordability, and the next gain comes from a costed rural-fibre build rather than from more payments adoption.

What Bangladesh has already won

Mobile financial services are the country's one global-class digital achievement. Bangladesh Bank MFS data report 239 million registered accounts as of January 2025, with monthly transaction value of about Tk 1.5 lakh crore (August 2025), driven by bKash, Nagad, and Rocket. This is financial inclusion at a scale most low- and lower-middle-income countries have not reached, and it was built on mobile rails rather than bank branches.

ICT service exports are the second win. EPB data put ICT and IT-enabled service exports at $724.6 million in FY2024-25, up 7.7 percent year-on-year, making the sector the fastest-growing foreign-exchange earner outside ready-made garments. FY2024-25 is the latest audited full year; FY2025-26 closes on 30 June 2026 and full-year data is not yet published. The headline understates the real footprint: BASIS reports documented freelancing earnings of roughly $250-300 million a year that official EPB figures do not capture, with the true figure higher. Bangladesh already has a working digital export base; the question is whether the underlying infrastructure can let it compound.

What is holding the next stage back

The constraint is connectivity quality, not coverage or rules. Fixed broadband at 7.89 subscriptions per 100 people (ITU / World Bank, 2023) is about a third of Vietnam's 22.68. India is not a useful upside benchmark here: its fixed broadband is lower than Bangladesh's, at 2.75 per 100, because Indian households reach the internet largely over mobile rather than fixed lines. The two binding factors are last-mile fibre and affordability: the fibre does not reach most upazilas, and retail prices remain high relative to rural incomes. Spectrum allocation is not the bottleneck.

The legal overhang that used to deter investors has been cleared. The Cyber Security Ordinance 2025, effective 21 May 2025, replaced the Cyber Security Act 2023 (which had replaced the Digital Security Act 2018) and removed its most contested speech-offence provisions, while assigning national incident response to the Bangladesh Computer Council acting as the National Computer Emergency Response Team. It was promulgated under the interim government, before the BNP administration was sworn on 17 February 2026. The successive General Economics Division strategies on Digital Bangladesh and the knowledge economy long identified affordable broadband and ICT-led exports as the priority; the policy diagnosis is settled. What is missing is execution on the physical network.

Why this matters now

Mixed vintages can mask the trend, so they are stated plainly: the MFS figures are January and August 2025, the ICT export figure is FY2024-25, and the broadband comparison is 2023. Read together, they describe a single gap. Demand-side adoption (payments, exports, freelancing) has run ahead of supply-side infrastructure (fixed broadband). A digital export sector that depends on reliable, affordable connectivity cannot scale on a 7.9-per-100 broadband base, however strong the payments layer is.

The window is favourable. The Ministry of Posts, Telecommunications and Information Technology under the BNP government (sworn 17 February 2026) has named extending broadband to every upazila and making it affordable a stated priority. A clean post-Ordinance legal slate and explicit ministerial focus on rural connectivity are the right preconditions. The risk is that the priority stays rhetorical rather than a costed, sequenced build.

Recommendations

1. BTRC and the ICT Division should publish a costed last-mile fibre plan with annual per-upazila milestones, owned by BTRC, within the FY2026-27 budget cycle. A "broadband to every upazila" commitment without a published per-upazila build cost and year-by-year coverage schedule is an aspiration, not a plan. Publishing the schedule lets private operators and lenders price participation. Expected effect: moves fixed broadband off the current 7.9 per 100 toward Vietnam's 22.7 band. Success signal: ITU / World Bank fixed broadband per 100 rises above 12 by 2028, with a published quarterly upazila-coverage dashboard.
2. BTRC should attack affordability directly through wholesale open access and shared-infrastructure mandates, with the regulator owning the price benchmark. Coverage that rural households cannot afford does not raise the 7.9-per-100 figure. Pair the fibre build with mandatory passive-infrastructure sharing so retail prices fall as the network extends. Success signal: median entry-level fixed broadband price falls below 2 percent of monthly household income outside metropolitan areas, tracked in BTRC's tariff filings.
3. The ICT Division should fold documented freelancing and IT-enabled services into the EPB export count, owned by the ICT Division with EPB. BASIS reports roughly $250-300 million in documented annual freelancing earnings outside official figures. Capturing it through payment-gateway reporting and registered-freelancer data gives the $724.6 million headline an accurate denominator and a defensible base for incentive design. Success signal: EPB's published FY2026-27 ICT export series includes a reconciled freelancing line.
4. The NCERT function assigned to the Bangladesh Computer Council under the Cyber Security Ordinance 2025 should be made operational on a fixed timeline, owned by the ICT Division. With more than 200 million MFS accounts and about Tk 1.5 lakh crore in monthly flows, an operational national incident-response capability is a prerequisite for keeping the payments win, not an optional extra. Success signal: a staffed NCERT with mandatory critical-infrastructure incident reporting live before end-2026.

What would change this view

If Bangladesh Bank MFS data revise the registered-account figure sharply downward for duplicate or dormant accounts, the "payments won" framing weakens. If updated ITU or BTRC broadband data show fixed penetration has already moved well past the 2023 reading of 7.9 per 100, the urgency of the fibre recommendation drops. The strongest counterargument is that fixed broadband is the wrong target: India reaches the internet over mobile at 2.75 fixed broadband per 100, so Bangladesh could route its digital-export growth through mobile and fixed wireless instead of fibre. The answer is that sustained software work, cloud services, and freelancing at scale need symmetric, low-latency uplink that mobile networks do not reliably provide, which is why Vietnam's fibre-led path, not India's mobile-led one, is the relevant model. If a published upazila fibre plan with credible per-upazila costing and secured financing emerges, recommendations 1 and 2 become monitoring tasks rather than open gaps.