No additional cost for MFS users to check balance: BTRC

Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) has said mobile financial service (MFS) users would not bear any extra cost for balance check.

The telecom regulator came up with a clarification today saying there was no specification in its directive on MFS whether the customers or the MFS operator would bear the charge of Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD), a mobile phone operator-driven service.

Under the BTRC directive that was issued on June 13 this year, the mobile operators were allowed to charge revenue generating MFS Taka 0.85 and non-revenue generating mobile financial transaction Taka 0.4 for each session of USSD of 90 seconds.

The BTRC directive mentioned that the mobile operators would get charge from the MFS operators based on the usage of USSD sessions by the MFS subscribers.

BTRC in its clarification mentioned that the rate was fixed on August 14 last year.

The charges for using USSD session for revenue generating and non-revenue generating MFS transaction were imposed on the MFS operator, added the BTRC.