First Solution Money Transfer - Bangladesh Bank

Bangladesh Bank

The Bangladesh Bank governor stated that First Solution was not given a license by the Bangladesh Bank. However, First Solution is listed on the Bangladesh Bank's website as having agreements with a number of banks in Bangladesh through which it was permitted to remit money into the country.

However, there are also a number of companies in the UK provided remittance facilities to Bangladesh which do not have the approval of Bangladesh Bank nor are they listed in the UK section of Bangladesh Bank's inward remittance providers list.

In an article in the East London Advertiser, Dr. Roger Ballard of the Centre for Applied South Asian Studies at the University of Manchester suggests that First Solution may well have been the first fruits of efforts by the UK's Department for International Development (DFID) to replace 'informal' community-based value transfer networks with 'more reliable' formal sector initiatives. DFID made a GB£7.5 million grant to the Bank of Bangladesh to achieve just that.

But although their publicly announced reason for doing so was to provide migrants with cheaper and more reliable services, the underling subtext of such initiatives - also strongly backed by the World Bank and the US Treasury - was to prevent these 'informal' 'underground' networks being used by terrorists and drugs smugglers - even though there was little or no evidence that hawala networks were actually being used for such purposes. Most informed commentators concluded that such 'informal' networks provided migrant workers with a service which was easier to access, cheaper, swifter, and if anything even more reliable than those provided by the banks and other former sector agencies.

DFID thought otherwise. First Solution was only too ready to agree, and carefully conformed with the necessary regulatory requirements - which were all about countering Terrorist finance and Anti-money laundering. The regulations made no reference to steps to be taken to ensure financial reliability. In the past there had been no need to do so. Trust-based networks which grew out of local communities had been extremely reliable.

However, First Solution was a totally different kind of beast. It was organised by the top down, had the blessings of the Bangladesh Bank, and perhaps of DFID as well (although they have so far kept their heads well below the parapet). But First Solution was a limited company: it wasn't grounded in networks of mutual trust or coalitions of reciprocity; and as a limited company it operated on the principle of caveat emptor - buyer beware. That's the capitalist logic of formality.