Bangladesh
Payments

Correction — 14 October 2026: Stripe merchant eligibility has been corrected, unsupported checkout shares and licensing timelines have been removed, and NPSB's date is stated as the regulator's instructed commencement date. The dated MFS network figures below are historical context, not retail-payment market shares.

Bangladesh merchant acceptance combines mobile financial services (MFS), card acquiring and bank-transfer routes. Start with the contracting merchant entity and the customer channel. A mobile wallet's reach, a gateway's advertised coverage and an individual merchant's eligibility answer different questions.

Historical MFS scale and its limits

The existing historical sources report 238.6 million registered MFS accounts in December 2024 and BDT 17.37 lakh crore in MFS transaction value during 2024. Account totals are not unique people; network transaction value is not e-commerce checkout spend. Neither figure provides a denominator for allocating consumer payments among MFS, cards and cash.

The method list on this page is therefore unranked. Select and test methods against your customer segment, order value and fulfilment model instead of using an unsupported national checkout percentage as a conversion forecast.

Merchant collection versus wallet transfers

bKash's business products include online payment services, merchant QR, and corporate collection and disbursement. These are distinct routes. A merchant collecting an order payment needs to establish the intended product and its account eligibility rather than treating a consumer transfer as interchangeable with merchant acceptance.

The merchant application asks about NID, valid trade licence and bank-account status. Those questions are a practical onboarding starting point, not an approval guarantee or a complete legal test for foreign-owned entities.

For Nagad and Rocket, request current acceptance documentation and a demonstration for the exact product from the provider or gateway you intend to contract with. Do not infer identical integration, refund or settlement behavior from their inclusion in the MFS category.

NPSB: instruction versus live reachability

Bangladesh Bank's quarterly report records PSD Circular No. 12 of 13 October 2025, instructing banks, MFS providers and PSPs to commence interoperable NPSB transactions from 1 November 2025. The report supplies that policy date, not a current provider-by-provider coverage matrix.

Before using a bank-to-wallet or wallet-to-bank route, verify both endpoints, the permitted account type, fees and transfer limits. Test the intended direction and obtain the reference fields needed for reconciliation. An announced interoperability framework is insufficient evidence that a specific payroll, merchant-collection or seller-payout flow will work.

Merchant route and provider checks

The checks below are operator guidance for comparing contracts and integrations.

SSLCOMMERZ advertises card, mobile-banking, internet-banking and wallet channels. Its product description is a useful starting point; confirm the named methods enabled in your account rather than assuming every advertised method is available for every merchant. The provider examples here are not exhaustive or ranked.

Stripe and cross-border merchant eligibility

Stripe's global availability page does not list Bangladesh as a supported merchant country. Do not plan to onboard a Bangladesh entity on the premise that Stripe offers limited local acquiring or that selling SaaS changes country eligibility.

Stripe separately describes incorporation of a US company through Atlas. That introduces a different legal entity and onboarding route; it is not direct Stripe eligibility for an existing Bangladesh merchant. Likewise, a supported-country merchant taking payment from a Bangladeshi customer is different from onboarding a business established in Bangladesh. See the local versus cross-border acquiring reference for these distinctions.

Regulatory scope and launch decision

Write down who contracts with the customer, who receives or holds funds, and who executes payouts or currency conversion. Confirm current Bangladesh Bank requirements for those activities and the proposed entity with qualified local advice. Merchant checkout onboarding and permission to operate a payment service are separate questions. A gateway agreement or working API does not resolve the regulatory position of the whole funds flow.

Before signing, obtain the provider's legal name and permission details, settlement-account requirements, fee schedule and escalation process. Do not use a generic licensing timeline or an assumed foreign-ownership eligibility rule to set a launch date.

Before launch, run representative payment, failure, refund and settlement cases for each enabled method. Match the order reference to the provider transaction and bank credit, identify the owner of any break, and retain an exception queue for unresolved payments. The PSP reconciliation failure runbook provides the next operational step.