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The United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF) makes public and private finance work for the poor in the world’s 46 least developed countries. With its capital mandate and instruments, UNCDF offers “last mile” finance models that unlock public and private resources, especially at the domestic level, to reduce poverty and support local economic development.

Through this RFA, UNCDF proposes to work with a registered entity in Bangladesh that can develop an interoperable fund transfer platform between banks where a banked customer can remit funds to an unbanked or other bank’s customer. Our proposed platform can cater to the otherwise formally financially excluded segment of the customers. Such platform can bridge transactions between the unbanked and the banked/wallet users therefore creating a more inclusive and connected eco-system offering speed and convenience of all. This also aligns with Government of Bangladesh’s National Financial Inclusion Strategy 2019-2024 to formally include unbanked-unserved segment of population financially.

The selected entity should use an Open-Source real time payment framework and platform. An open-source platform will allow any technology development and learnings to be passed to Bangladesh Bank or another national scheme operator in the future. Platforms such as Mojaloop are well suited as they are designed specifically for last mile payments across several classes of FSPs (Banks, MFIs, Mobile money operators etc).

The requirement is to support already ongoing efforts by having more of use cases that most clearly serve the poor and the low income first, in particular the most marginalized such as micro-merchants, women and youth.

Selected applicants will be signing a Performance-Based Agreement1 (PBA) with UNCDF.

The foreseen budget assigned by UNCDF will be up to USD 300,000. Applicants are expected to fund at least 30% of the total project cost in cash (for costs such technical resources, staff, and operational expenses).

The solution proposed must be implementable during 12 months and ending by October 2022.

All applications must be submitted by 23:59 (EST, the New York time zone) on September 1st, 2021 via APPLY.

In case of questions write at rfa.ide.asia@uncdf.org