Bangladesh Bank circular vs circular letter

Bangladesh Bank publishes its instructions to banks and financial institutions on one archive page that, when we fetched it on 12 October 2026, held 4,793 rows going back to 2000. In the 30 days before that date the page listed 32 new circulars; in the previous 7 days, 8.

The two instruments

• A circular typically introduces or restates a policy or instruction: a new limit, a reporting requirement, a change to a prudential rule.
• A circular letter is typically shorter and refers back to an existing circular: a clarification, an extension of a deadline, a correction, or a partial amendment.

This is the practical pattern, not a statutory definition. A circular letter can change an obligation as much as a circular can, so both must be read and both must be tracked against the earlier instrument they refer to.

The department prefix

Every title begins with a department code: BRPD (banking regulation and policy), DOS (off-site supervision), FEPD (foreign exchange policy), FEOD (foreign exchange operations), PSD (payment systems), DFIM (financial institutions and markets), SMESPD, DMD, DCM and others. BFIU, the financial intelligence unit, publishes its own list on a separate site with the same table layout. The prefix is the cheapest useful topic tag you can have: a treasury team can filter on FEPD and FEOD and ignore most of the rest.

Numbering and dates

Numbers restart each calendar year within a department ("BRPD Circular No. 05" and "BRPD Circular Letter No. 05" are different documents). Dates on the archive page are in DD/MM/YY format. The archive offers English and Bangla PDFs for most items; the English PDFs we sampled had a text layer and the server returned ETag and Last-Modified headers, which is why conditional fetching works well for this source.

A simple register discipline

• Record the department, type, number, year and date exactly as printed.
• When a circular letter cites an earlier circular, link them. "In force today" is the combination, not the latest file.
• Keep the PDF hash. Reissued files with the same name do occur.

RuleScan AI applies this discipline automatically and shows the supersession link as a rule-based suggestion for your compliance team to confirm.