Dhaka, Jan. 21 -- Villagers used to depend on usurers and thereafter on NGOs for small moneys, from time immemorial. Gonna are the days of those moneylenders--a banking derivation called agent banking usurps the usurers by changing fast the macroeconomic landscape in the rural areas with increasing participation of female clients in the formal credit system, in particular. A greater dimension of the banking innovation is it is, basically, emerging as an effective icebreaking financial intervention in terms of removing gender disparity in rural Bangladesh where engaging women in the money market was the most critical task even one and a half decades ago.

But things have changed rapidly by virtue of the intervention by agent banking largel...