Q-Cash services restored across around 30 banks

From 8 October 2026 — Daily Brief

Card and digital-payment services have been restored across around 30 Bangladeshi banks after a Q-Cash system migration disrupted transactions for two days.

ATM, card, point-of-sale, e-commerce, QR and National Payment Switch-related services resumed on Tuesday night, according to the network operator and participating banks. Several lenders subsequently told customers that transactions were functioning normally again.

The disruption began on 4 October during a system migration by IT Consultants PLC, which operates Q-Cash. Banks had initially warned that some services could remain unavailable until 10 October.

Bangladesh Bank summoned the operator and directed it to restore card-related services quickly because of the impact on customers. The central bank has also sought an explanation of the disruption.

The episode highlights the concentration risk created when a large group of banks relies on common payment infrastructure. Even when individual banks’ own systems remain operational, a failure at a shared network can affect millions of customers simultaneously.

The immediate outage has ended, but the incident is likely to raise questions about migration planning, redundancy, communication with banks and customers, and resilience requirements for critical payment systems.