Pakistan, and its financial services industry, suffers from a reputation problem when it comes to digitalisation on the customer end. Anecdotally, it often seems that people aren’t too satisfied with the products and user experience, especially in areas like onboarding, dispute resolution, and overall seamlessness.
Yet, one look at the payments report suggests none of it is really deterring the uptake. Almost every data point exhibits a high growth trajectory, even if people may not appreciate its extent at times. As of FY25, Pakistan boasts more than 123 million registered digital platform users across mobile, internet, branchless and other wallets. For context, that’s slightly more than half of all registered deposit-taking accounts in the country.
This is not a mean feat by any stretch of the imagination, because not too long ago, Pakistan ranked at the bottom of most rankings. Usage has been even more explosive, with mobile banking alone processing a throughput of Rs83.2 trillion in FY25, up 80 per cent over the previous year.
More importantly, it processed 1.8 billion transactions during the year, outpacing ATMs, internet banking, point-of-sale, and e-commerce combined. And remember, it’s not even the biggest driver of digital payment: that mantle belongs to branchless wallets, which recorded volumes of 4.2bn, albeit worth a much smaller Rs14.2tr.
