The recent shake-up to BML debit card limits is not connected to the government’s foreign debt repayments last month. Chief Spokesperson at the President’s Office Mohamed Hussain Shareef told reporters today.
He pushed backed on a theory that has been doing the rounds online: namely, that the bank tightened card spending because the government had drained its dollar reserves servicing debt. Not the case, he said.
“Don’t Connect the Dots That Aren’t There”
Shareef walked journalists through the timeline at his weekly briefing. BML’s Managing Director Mohamed Shareef had already laid out the bank’s operational position at a separate press conference. The two sets of decisions, the spokesperson stressed, sit on completely different tracks.
“We urge against drawing a correlation between our recent loan settlements or the cleared FX swaps and the bank’s decisions. These financial obligations were met without causing any disruptions or difficulties to our national cash flow. Therefore, the government’s debt clearance during the past month bear no relation to the measures implemented by BML,” he said.
It is a sharp message, and a deliberate one. Foreign debt repayments in a small, dollar-thin economy always attract scrutiny. So when a major bank changes its dollar policy a few weeks later, the public does the math: even when the math does not actually add up. Today’s briefing was, in essence, the government asking people to put the calculator down.
What BML Actually Changed, and Why
The bank’s recent moves come down to two specific tweaks, both aimed at curbing misuse rather than rationing dollars.
The first argues a problem that has annoyed the bank, and many cardholders, for some time. People who are not traveling have been letting others use their cards to spend in foreign currency. To stop that, BML has now linked card behavior to actual location. Foreign spending limits for POS and ATM transactions will only kick in when the cardholder is physically abroad. The bank pulled this off through a coordination arrangement with Maldives Immigration, which can flag whether a cardholder has actually left the country.
The second tweak goes after a different breed of misuse. Personal Rufiyaa cards have been quietly powering large-scale commercial activity on online platforms: drop-shippers, resellers, and informal e-commerce operators using personal accounts as business pipelines. BML has now capped retail customers at 30 e-commerce transactions per month. The cap leaves ordinary online shoppers comfortably untouched while choking out the heavy commercial use case the bank wants pushed onto proper merchant accounts.
The Bigger Picture
Both BML debit card limits adjustments fit a pattern of tightening misuse loopholes rather than rationing access. They are about who is using the card, and how, not about how much foreign currency the country has left in the tank. That is the line the government wants the public to take home from Thursday’s briefing.
Whether the explanation lands depends on the months ahead. If the dollar squeeze eases, the spokesperson’s framing will hold up neatly. If it tightens, the same questions will return, and BML, not just the government, will be answering them.