In 2020, a bKash user could not pay a merchant using their Nagad account. A bank card could not pull funds from a mobile wallet. Bangladesh's financial system was a collection of isolated silos. Bangladesh Bank's National Payment Switch Bangladesh (NPSB) initiative — connecting banks, MFS providers, and card networks through a central switch — has fundamentally changed this. As of 2025, 53 financial institutions are connected through a single interoperability layer.
What NPSB Interoperability Actually Enables
NPSB connectivity enables real-time fund transfer between any two connected institutions — bank-to-bank, bank-to-MFS, MFS-to-merchant — with transaction settlement in under 30 seconds. For consumers, this means paying for groceries from Nagad using funds in a Sonali Bank account. For businesses, it means receiving payments from any financial instrument their customers use, without maintaining separate merchant accounts at each institution.
- 53 connected institutions (banks, MFS, PSPs) as of Q1 2025
- Transaction routing: 100,000+ per hour at sub-200ms latency
- Settlement: real-time gross settlement for high-value, batch for retail
- ISO 20022 messaging standard — compatible with SWIFT cross-border
- CDS NPSB gateway: deployed at partner banking institutions
- Fraud monitoring: transaction pattern analysis with <50ms decision latency
The Institutions Winning From NPSB
Financial institutions that invested in API-first core banking upgrades between 2021–2024 are capturing disproportionate transaction volume. Their NPSB integration took weeks, not months. They can onboard new payment product partners in days. Their transaction costs are 40–60% lower than institutions still processing through manual batch files. CDS builds and operates NPSB gateway infrastructure for partner financial institutions.
“Our NPSB transaction volume grew 340% in 12 months after CDS upgraded our gateway. We are now the preferred settlement bank for three new fintech partners who chose us specifically because of our API response times.”
— Head of Digital Banking, Private Commercial Bank