DHAKA: Speakers at a webinar recently said digital

economy will make transaction faster, reliable, and reduce cost of doing
business.

`If all economic activities are digitalized, transaction would be faster-
reliable and cost of doing business will decrease. Besides, Informal and
hidden economy would be transformed into formal while gray and black economy
turn into transparent one,’ they opined.

Speakers made the remarks at the webinar on ‘Economics of Digital Payment
System for Growth: Comparative Practices and the Bangladesh Narratives’
organized by the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Bangladesh (ICAB),
said a press release.

Post, Telecommunication and Information Technology minister Mustafa Jabbar
joined the event as the chief guest.

Speakers said, `Now Bangladesh is evolving with enormous economic
potentialities. It has maintained an average growth rate of 8 percent over
last few years. This is because the economy has been turning to
industrialized digital economy where everything is connected digitally’.

The traditional revenue collection, banking, payment system, all
components of a country’s Economic Machine are now transforming into
digitally operations, they added.

Experts in these areas claim that by digitizing revenue collection and
expenditure payment with a real time settlement would result in increase of
revenue, reduce transaction cost and other costs, would increase annual
revenue minimum four times from the analog and paper-based collection system.

ICAB President Shahadat Hossain delivered address of welcome. Professor
Mustafizur Rahman, Distinguished Fellow, Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD) and
Khondkar Atique-e- Rabbani , Member – ICAB & Managing Director, The Computers
Ltd joined as panel speakers.

ICAB Past President A K Gulam Kibria was the session chairman while Dr
Jamaluddin Ahmed, Past President-ICAB presented the keynote paper.

ICAB President Shahadat Hossain said, the contribution of IT industry to
the ongoing economic growth of Bangladesh is getting bigger day by day.

He said, Bangladesh has made significant progress in the digital economy
in the last four years and has taken place in the list of ‘Top Movers’ of
2019. The other three countries on the list are: Ukraine, South Africa and
Algeria. This list has been compiled by assessing the progress of the world
in digital economy from 2015 to 2019.

Keynote speaker Dr Jamaluddin Ahmed in his paper said, adoption of digital
technology causes the changes to economic behavior and the costs of doing
business which is shifting downwards as digital technology evolves in
processing and running billions of economic transactions.

The payment system of a country entails the transfer of value from one to
the other economic agent. As the economic activity grew following agriculture
and industrial advances, increasing payments needed to be made over greater
distances, and so both volumes and values of interbank obligations increased,
he said.

ICAB Vice President NKA Mobin gave concluding remarks.