Kamal Quadir

About Kamal Quadir

Kamal Quadir is the Founder and CEO of bKash, the mobile financial service that brought digital money to tens of millions of previously unbanked people in Bangladesh. As The Business Standard has described, his path to fintech ran through art school and a failed animation startup before it ever touched mobile money.

From Jashore to Oberlin

Quadir was born in Jashore, Bangladesh, the youngest of ten siblings in a family that faced hardship after his father's death in 1972. He attended a local Catholic school before moving to the United States, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in art and economics from Oberlin College.

He later returned to formal business training, completing an MBA at the MIT Sloan School of Management in 2005. That combination of an arts education and an MIT business degree gave him an unusual set of instincts for a fintech founder.

A First Venture That Failed

Before bKash, Quadir and his elder brother Khalid Quadir set up GlobeKids, an animation company built to make cartoons. The venture ultimately failed, an early setback that came before his more successful run building CellBazaar, an electronic marketplace that grew to four million users and was acquired by Telenor in 2010.

That acquisition gave Quadir both the capital and the credibility to take on a much larger problem: getting basic financial services to Bangladeshis who had never held a bank account.

Building bKash

Quadir founded bKash in 2010, built around a network of community-based agents and simple mobile phone technology rather than smartphones or bank branches. The model let people send, receive, and store money using phones many already owned, sidestepping the infrastructure gap that had kept traditional banking out of reach for most of the country.

bKash grew to serve more than 82 million verified customers, and in 2021 it became the first Bangladeshi startup to reach unicorn status, a valuation of $1 billion or more.

International Recognition

In 2009, Quadir was named a TED Fellow and a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, recognition that came even before bKash reached its later scale. In 2015, he received the Schwab Foundation's Social Entrepreneur of the Year award for his work building financial inclusion through bKash.

Quadir remains bKash's CEO today, continuing to expand a platform that reshaped how a large share of Bangladesh's population accesses and moves money.