About
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Kamal Quadir is the Founder and CEO of bKash, a digital financial service that offers 70 million banked, underbanked and unbanked people access to financial services through basic cellphones or smartphones in Bangladesh.
Earlier Kamal founded CellBazaar, an ecommerce company, that has introduced a cellphone based electronic marketplace for developing countries. He is a practitioner who focuses his efforts on finance and technology that bring about social progress by enabling people to advance economically. He received the Tech Award in 2007 for “Applying Technology to Benefit Humanity.
Kamal is a founding member of Open World Initiatives, a Lausanne, Switzerland based organization of young thinkers. He is involved with Anwarul Quadir Foundation and Shireen Quadir Trust that recognize innovations in developing countries. He is a First Mover Fellow of The Aspen Institute. In 2009 the World Economic Forum and TED have respectively selected him as a Young Global Leader and a TED Fellow. In 2023 he was inducted in Boston Dealmakers Hall of Fame. He is an accomplished artist whose work is in the collection of Bangladesh National Museum. Kamal is a Management Committee Member of the Liberation War Museum in Bangladesh.
He has a BA from Oberlin College and an MBA from the Sloan School of Management at MIT.
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