Opinion · Fintech and Payments · South Asia · By Ali Tahir · Nov 15, 2026
Today Pakistan’s government stops writing one class of cheque. From 16 November, every payment under the Asaan Assignment Accounts moves to Raast, the State Bank of Pakistan’s instant payment system, and officials expect most departments to finish digitising by December. It is a real milestone. It is also the easy half of the job. The state can order its own money onto Raast. It cannot order a shopkeeper in Rawalpindi to prefer a QR code to a Rs1,000 note, and that choice, repeated a few hundred million times a day, is what decides whether Raast becomes a national payments habit or a very good government payroll pipe.
The rails are a success by any measure
Start with what has gone right, because a lot has. The State Bank’s Payment Systems Quarterly Review counted 3.7bn retail transactions in January to March 2026, with 3.4bn, or 92%, on digital channels. Raast alone carried 742m transactions worth Rs23.27tn (about $83bn) in the quarter, up from 295.7m transactions in October to December 2024. Volumes have more than doubled in 15 months.
Ahson Saeed, chief executive of Raast Payments Pakistan, told the Mobile Commerce conference in June that the system now handles 10m to 11m transactions a day and will process more than $500bn in 2026, which is larger than the economy it runs on.
The government has been Raast’s anchor tenant. A Finance Ministry document submitted to the National Assembly, reported by ProPakistani in October, says government-to-person disbursements through Raast and digital channels at centralised entities rose from Rs472bn (about $1.7bn) in July 2025 to Rs4.402tn (about $15.7bn) in June 2026. Benazir Income Support Programme payments moved to beneficiaries’ mobile wallets in July. Drawing and Disbursing Officers have been trained. Full digitisation of government payments is targeted for December 2026.
Few countries have built a real-time, interoperable, free-to-consumer payment rail this fast. That deserves saying plainly before the criticism.
Registered is not the same as used
Now the number that should worry everyone. By the end of March, more than 2.6m merchants had onboarded or registered aliases for Raast person-to-merchant (P2M) payments, according to the State Bank. The Finance Ministry’s own document puts active digital commerce payment points at 2.03m by June, including 1.73m merchants “actively” using Raast QR, up from a baseline of 500,000.
Set that against the transaction mix. Of the 742m Raast transactions in the March quarter, 664m were person-to-person transfers. Everything else, merchant payments included, was under 80m. Even if every one of those 78m had been a QR payment at a shop, that is roughly 30 transactions per registered merchant per quarter: one every three days. The true merchant figure is lower, because the remainder also includes bulk and government flows. That arithmetic is mine, but the inputs are the central bank’s.
The Express Tribune reported in September that some merchants steer customers towards cash, or towards easypaisa and JazzCash wallets, rather than Raast merchant channels, citing onboarding friction, reconciliation, settlement and worries about what a visible transaction record means for tax. Muhammad Hamayun Sajjad, chief executive of Mashreq Pakistan, put the shift the sector needs in one line: “The digital payments ecosystem is entering a phase where the focus needs to shift from access to adoption”.
Anyone who has run a product launch recognises this pattern. Registration is a vanity metric. Activation and repeat use are the business. Pakistan has reported the first and is quiet on the second.
Free for the consumer, paid for by nobody
Here is the structural problem. Raast P2P and P2M are free to consumers by design, which is the right call for inclusion. But someone has to pay to sign up a merchant, print the standee, train the cashier, handle the dispute and reconcile the till. For a bank or a wallet, Raast QR has no obvious revenue line.
The state bridged this with a Rs3.5bn (about $12.5m) subsidy for Raast P2M QR transactions, running from September 2025 to June 2026. That window has closed. Abdus Samad Khan, chief executive of iPath, told the Tribune that much of the momentum so far looks driven by regulatory encouragement, and that keeping consumer payments free leaves providers to recover their costs elsewhere. Faisal Mahmood of Karandaaz Pakistan framed the open question at the same June conference as “how to get economic value for the infrastructure”.
Mandates get a rail to launch. Aligned incentives get it past launch. India’s experience with merchant QR is instructive here not for its scale but for its sequencing: free acceptance first, then a layer of paid products (credit, settlement, data) that gave acquirers a reason to keep knocking on shop doors. Pakistan has the first layer. The second is barely sketched.
The most promising sign is the consent-based “pull payment” that Saeed said is in testing. A biller or lender collecting directly from a customer’s account, with prior approval and tokenised credentials, is the first Raast product with a business model attached. Utilities, schools, insurers and buy-now-pay-later lenders would pay for it. That is where the commercial energy should go.
The last mile is not a payments problem
The 6 November meeting chaired by the Prime Minister acknowledged something the headline numbers do not: the government is still developing a payment mechanism for areas without internet connectivity. In a market where mobile data drops out across large parts of the country, cash is not a habit to be marketed away. It is a rational response to an unreliable network.
There is a second last-mile gap. A pensioner who receives her payment on Raast and cashes it out at an agent the same afternoon has not been digitised. She has been given a different ATM. The December target measures the state’s side of the ledger, which is the side the state controls. It does not measure whether money, once digital, stays digital.
What I would do
Three moves, in order of difficulty.
- Report the right number. The State Bank should publish, monthly, transactions per active merchant QR and the 90-day repeat rate. Registration counts can quietly retire.
- Pay for repeat, not for sign-up. If a successor to the Rs3.5bn subsidy is funded, pay acquirers on the second, fifth and twentieth transaction at a merchant, not on the first. Acquisition is cheap. Retention is the work.
- Make the QR worth the tax visibility. A merchant who accepts Raast should get something a cash merchant cannot: same-day settlement, a credit line priced on verified P2M history, and pull payments to collect from their own customers. Give the shopkeeper a reason to want the record.
The rails are built, and built well. The next phase is a go-to-market problem, and go-to-market problems are not solved by deadlines.
What to watch
- How December is scored. Whether the Finance Ministry reports the target as “entities integrated” or as the share of government payment value actually settled over Raast.
- The P2M line in the next Quarterly Review. The State Bank’s July to September 2026 review is due. If non-P2P volume is still under 15% of Raast transactions, the gap between registered and used is widening, not closing.
- Pull payments. The launch date, the pricing model, and which billers sign first.
Ali Tahir is a B2B marketing leader with 17 years in fintech, SaaS and telecom across Pakistan, the GCC, the UK and the US, and a contributor to MEA Tech Watch. Views are his own.
