Dhaka, May 5 -- Interest calculating in SMART formula comes as a boon for banking as banks bag windfalls from a record spread between the rates they provide to depositors and take from borrowers.

Officials and bankers have said Bangladesh Bank's monetary-policy shift from monetary targeting to interest-rate targeting pays off for the country's commercial banks as they saw the widest spread in over nine years to March last.

Such leap between the difference of weighted average deposit and lending rates - called spread in banking parlance - gives some sort of respite to the banks which had witnessed their core incomes squeezing since the imposition of 9.0-percent lending cap in April 2020, according to sector-insiders.

According to data w...