Walk into a neighborhood kiryana after dinner and try to pay with your phone. If the shopkeeper points to a Raast QR, or sends you a request-to-pay and the receipt pings in both your apps in seconds, you are living in Pakistan’s financial future. If he shrugs, asks for cash, and says “bhai, signal nahin aata”—that future is still waiting outside.
For all the breathless talk about “digital transformation,” the question that matters is brutally practical: does a small merchant trust a digital payment as much as a crumpled note? Everything else—slick interfaces, press conferences, even the growth charts—only counts if it changes what happens at the till. And on that score, the last eighteen months have been the most consequential in Pakistan’s modern payments history.
Start with the rails. Pakistan’s instant payment system, Raast, has shifted from a promising pilot to a daily habit. In the quarter ending December 2024 (Q2-FY25), Raast processed 296 million instant transactions worth PKR 6.4 trillion. Digital channels overall did the heavy lifting: 88% of all retail transactions by volume ran through mobile apps, branchless wallets and e-money accounts, with mobile banking users reaching 21 million and branchless wallet users 64.3 million.
By June 2025 (Q3-FY25), the cadence accelerated again. Raast handled 371 million transactions worth PKR 8.5 trillion in a single quarter, pushing the cumulative count since launch past 1.5 billion. In-store POS activity expanded as well—roughly 99 million transactions across more than 140,000 merchants—while QR payments ticked up through the quarter. The broad direction is unmistakable: real-time account-to-account has become the country’s payment backbone.
Crucially, the regulator has stopped cheering from the sidelines and started setting defaults. In a circular on November 29, 2024, the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) told every regulated bank, microfinance bank, EMI, PSO and PSP to switch on Raast P2M (person-to-merchant) acceptance for existing merchant customers by March 31, 2025, and to make P2M part of every new merchant’s onboarding by default. Monthly progress reports were required; penalties were put on the table.
And yet, behavior changes slowly and unevenly. The same quarter that produced blockbuster Raast numbers also exposed a weak joint: P2M usage is still nascent compared to person-to-person transfers. Despite hundreds of thousands of enabled merchants, only about 1.5 million P2M transactions cleared in Q3-FY25—pocket change next to the P2P tide. It’s not a technology problem. It’s the familiar, human coordination problem: buyers assume the shop doesn’t take digital; shopkeepers assume customers don’t want it.
If you want to see where the checkout is really headed, look at e-commerce. When Pakistanis pay digitally online, they overwhelmingly use accounts and wallets, not cards. In Q2-FY25, 92% of e-commerce transactions by volume flowed through digital wallets/accounts (and 67% by value). That’s exactly what you’d expect in a market where an A2A transfer is real-time, fee-free for the payer, and authenticated on a familiar banking app.
The foundations of inclusion are quietly stronger, too. With Asaan Mobile Account (AMA), anyone with a CNIC can dial *2262# on any network—even a basic feature phone with no data—and open and use a bank account by USSD. AMA is not glamorous; it is practical. Pair that with the Consolidated Customer Onboarding Framework SBP issued in July 2025—which standardizes documentation, enables fully digital onboarding, and sets tighter turnaround expectations—and the front door to formal finance is wider than it has ever been before.
None of that erases the usage gap. Pakistan’s broadband base has grown fast—news reports this summer put broadband users around 150 million and total telecom subscribers at roughly 200 million—but “covered” does not mean “confident” or “able to pay for data.” The most hopeful statistic of the year landed in June: 8 million women came online in 2024, reducing the mobile internet gender gap sharply. The most sobering came in March: the cost of data and online safety remain stubborn barriers for women running small businesses and households.
The industry map is shifting, too. In January 2025, SBP awarded Pakistan’s first Digital Retail Bank (DRB) license and then, days later, declared Easypaisa Bank a scheduled bank. A wallet that began life on USSD in 2009 now sits inside the banking perimeter with a digital-first charter. It’s a signal to legacy players: payments, deposits, and everyday financial tasks are no longer chained to branch economics.
Diaspora finance has already delivered a proof point for “digital done right.” The Roshan Digital Account—remote onboarding for overseas Pakistanis—has channeled more than US$10.7 billion since 2020, even through choppy macro weather. It is a simple promise kept: open from abroad, fund instantly, invest transparently, repatriate cleanly, and stay connected to Pakistan’s economy without friction.
Regulation is extending into new money, too. In July 2025, Pakistan enacted a legal framework for virtual assets, creating a dedicated regulator (PVARA) to license and oversee the sector. Around the same time, SBP confirmed plans to pilot a central bank digital currency (CBDC). Neither of these should be mistaken for a crypto free-for-all; they are about putting programmable value inside a rule-of-law perimeter with strong oversight.
There is, however, a stubborn structural gravity pulling against customer-centric change: the banks’ love affair with government paper. By early 2024, the IMF estimated banks’ sovereign exposure at 57.4% of assets, a level unmatched globally. KPMG puts government securities at around 60% of bank assets as of 2024–2025. When the easiest profit still comes from parking deposits in T-bills and PIBs, an institution has little urgency to take the hard road of building MSME underwriting that fuels the real economy.
So what would it take to declare victory at the checkout?
First, acceptance by default must mean usage by default. Second, get settlement right for the smallest merchants. Third, lean into account-to-account at checkout. Fourth, treat connectivity barriers as a payments problem. Fifth, use payments data to underwrite the real economy. Finally, keep the rules boring and the promises vivid.
If 2023 was the year the rules were written and 2024–2025 the years the pipes were pressurized, 2026 should be the year cash starts to feel inconvenient. That won’t happen by accident. It will happen because a kiryana owner decides that money in the account now beats money in the drawer tonight; because a buyer discovers the relief of a clean digital receipt; because a bank discovers that lending against live sales beats hoarding T-bills. When those preferences line up, the line at the counter will move from hesitation to habit.
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