Muktinath Bikas Bank actively looks for ways to create social impact, with financial literacy awareness being one of its important Corporate Social Responsibility activities. This is due to a lack of proper understanding of banking products and services among people in remote areas.
The Importance of Financial Literacy Awareness
The Central Bank of Nepal made Financial and Digital Literacy a priority for its Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities. As a financial institution, Muktinath Bikas Bank places great importance on financial literacy. These programmes are necessary to onboard customers and provide access to people who can benefit from banking products and services but are not aware of them. Many people, especially in rural areas of Nepal, borrow money at very high-interest rates from other people instead of coming to a bank due to the lack of awareness. Organising awareness campaigns helps the bank reach these people directly.
Namrata Gautam, Incharge – Branding & Corporate Affairs at Muktinath Bikas Bank:
“With the Financial Literacy, Digital Promotion & D2D programme, the bank tried to access both the remote and urbanized localities to create awareness about banking products and services. Through the programme, the bank wanted to encourage more and more people to transact through our banking channels.”
The Financial Literacy Programme
In April 2023, Muktinath Bikas Bank organized a two-day intensive programme that included participation from all its 178 branch outlets and the Central Office of the Bank across the seven provinces of the nation. The bank managed to organise over 140 events at various public spaces and also in colleges and schools.
Muktinath adopted two modalities for this programme: one was a classroom setting of one presenter and audience, and the other modality was all the staff members participating in going from household to household to create awareness about banking products and services. The programmes were managed by joint initiation of different branches or by each branch individually.
Over 1,600 staff members of the bank, including executive members, participated in the programme. Through it, more than 10,000 people opened bank savings accounts with the bank, and the bank had more than 6,500 participants in the classroom setting modality alone, totalling 16,500+ and counting. The financial literacy programmes aim to provide awareness on various financial transactions, future planning of students, secured savings, family budget and planning, and other related topics.
Simran Pradhan, a participant in the Financial Literacy Programme, said:
“ I had the opportunity to learn the basic concepts of savings, loans and demat account. Considering relatively people of my age are young and are still not financially literate, the bank provided me with a great insight to start to manage my finance through this programme.“
Muktinath Bikas Bank has been active in financial literacy awareness campaigns for a few years. It has adopted both the classroom model, where one presenter explains banking to various attendees, and the door-to-door model, where each staff member talks directly to various people by going door-to-door in their nearby localities, separately at various time periods. This campaign created the biggest impact as the bank collaborated on a much larger scale, creating wider banking awareness across Nepal.
