An institutional partnership has been forged to accelerate the adoption of digital retail commerce and optimize the merchant acceptance footprint across the domestic financial landscape. Karandaaz Pakistan, a prominent vehicle for financial inclusion, has teamed up with the global Better Than Cash Alliance, a specialized multilateral initiative hosted by the United Nations Development Programme. This cross-border alliance is explicitly designed to expand real-time digital merchant payments throughout the country, shifting the national transactional ecosystem away from its traditional heavy reliance on physical currency.
To anchor and direct this collaborative framework, stakeholders have authorized the immediate deployment of the National Merchant Payments Working Group. Formed under the direct regulatory stewardship and oversight of the State Bank of Pakistan, this specialized working group will operate as a neutral, industry-wide coordination engine. The foundational architecture of the body draws extensively upon tested, high-performing merchant digitization frameworks implemented across leading regional emerging markets, ensuring that local deployment aligns with global operational benchmarks.
While the sovereign digital public infrastructure of Pakistan has recorded remarkable technological milestones, most notably exemplified by the rapid retail scaling of the central bank instant payment rail, Raast, and its specific Person-to-Merchant layer, actual operational adoption among grassroots commercial entities has remained noticeably uneven. The newly established working group is engineered to systematically bridge this execution gap. The immediate strategic priorities of the group target the elimination of burdensome onboarding friction, the resolution of persistent back-end operational bottlenecks, and the aggressive advancement of gender-inclusive financial access for women entrepreneurs and independent neighborhood micro-merchants.
Structurally, the National Merchant Payments Working Group acts as a unified platform, binding together commercial banks, aggressive fintech startups, specialized payment service providers, merchant acquirers, and localized retail trader associations. This diverse composition is built to facilitate cross-sector technical dialogue, allowing market participants to co-create practical corporate solutions and deliver unified recommendations directly to state regulators. Furthermore, the body is tasked with designing and launching localized, time-bound proofs of concept to visually demonstrate the commercial viability and financial security of Raast-enabled cashless ecosystems across underserved and lower-tier national market segments.
Highlighting the strategic importance of the collaboration, Waqas ul Hasan, Chief Executive Officer of Karandaaz Pakistan, emphasized that achieving a truly cashless economy requires moving beyond simple person-to-person transfers to digitize everyday business transactions. He noted that this collective forum will serve as a launchpad where small businesses can safely transition away from physical currency, unlocking entirely new economic opportunities. This vision is supported by the extensive global expertise of the Better Than Cash Alliance, which brings insights from implementation across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, alongside its policy leadership within the G7 and G20, while Karandaaz injects its deep domestic regulatory network and small business research into the project.
Nshuti Mbabazi, Managing Director of the Better Than Cash Alliance, further observed that responsible digital transactions serve as a critical catalyst for financial transparency and systemic economic efficiency. She pointed out that while Pakistan merchant payment landscape holds enormous untapped potential, large-scale adoption remains constrained by ongoing questions surrounding the affordability, sustainability, and commercial viability of digital networks for value-chain suppliers. To effectively bridge this divide, the newly structured working group will focus heavily on building industry consensus around sustainable merchant payment models, enabling structured knowledge exchanges between local and international experts, and consolidating unified private sector perspectives to assist regulatory authorities in shaping future digital policies.
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