Pakistan's digital economy needs patience, not speed

From fintech to banking

Hamayun Sajad arrived at United Bank Limited through an unconventional path. A technical founder who built payment systems in Myanmar and Australia, he was pulled away from consulting work to lead UBL’s digital overhaul. “I’m actually a technical man,” Sajad says. “Programming, telecom, software, I’ve worked on this. But I think EasyPaisa pulled me into financial services.”

His early work on EasyPaisa, launched in 2009 to bring mobile money to Pakistan, taught him how the unbanked population thinks. Then Wave Money in Myanmar showed him a developing market desperate for financial inclusion. Australia revealed the flip side: a mature market where even advanced features barely penetrate user behavior.

“I was competing with Tata Consulting on a project for Commonwealth Bank,” Sajad recalls. “My proposal was superior. But the head of the bank said Tata Consulting is a 500,000-person company. Even if the project fails, I have insurance. You’re a small company.” That moment crystallized why banking requires patience. Trust and compliance are not commodities.

The bitter truth about digital adoption

Digital booms everywhere except banking. Muzimail points out that TikTok hit 25 million users in Pakistan by 2019, penetrating rural areas effortlessly. Yet credit cards and QR codes languish at single-digit adoption. The difference is psychological.

“Banking is very sophisticated and trust-based,” Sajad explains. “When BBVA and Citibank launched digital-only initiatives, they thought one app would replace branches. They realized that people decide whether they come to a branch.” The lesson: give users choice, not ultimatums.

Sajad observed that the app McKinsey saw 27 percent of people in developed countries using advanced digital banking features. “If you have an Apple Watch, nobody doesn’t get a good health status. How many people who use Apple Watch have become a better, healthier person? You will find out that 10-15 percent. 80-85 percent of people will not utilize all of them.”

Why QR codes didn’t work in Pakistan

Pakistan rolled out QR payment schemes with fanfare. UBL launched it with MasterCard in 2016. But adoption stalled.

The culprit was not technology. It was merchant burden. In China, the customer holds up their phone and the merchant scans. In Pakistan, the flow forced the customer to pull out their phone, open an app, scan the QR code, enter the amount, and wait for the SMS confirmation while the merchant stands there watching.

“The merchant is waiting for the customer to do the transaction,” Sajad says. Contrast that with cards: “Merchant is working. In QR, the merchant says, dude, you put it. Scan it. Now put the amount.”

Muzamil shares a real example from Islamabad. At a petrol pump, he wanted to use QR instead of cash. “The machine is not doing it. Then you say, try it. And it’s done. But there is, for some weird reason, it’s not that acceptance is happening.”

Wirecard and the trust tax

When the fintech Wirecard collapsed, it sent a message to Pakistan’s banking leaders: moving fast can destroy more than it builds.

“Wirecard had a few billion dollars in capital and hit rock bottom because they couldn’t manage their financials,” Sajad recounts. During audit, there were leakages. Wirecard processed payments for countless neobanks and suddenly, all of them faced credibility shock.

That’s why Pakistani banks, particularly UBL, move deliberately. “Technology and digital use it. That’s how we will evolve. But don’t do it quickly. Make sure that trust and bank customer confidence doesn’t shake.”

Muzamil shares how his mother-in-law’s Silk Bank account was compromised when someone called, sent an OTP, and drained Rs 5.5 million within five minutes. The bank blamed her for sharing the OTP. This is why customer confidence in digital channels erodes.

RAST: the national payments layer

Pakistan’s State Bank launched RAST, a national payments platform that connects all banks with standardized APIs. This is the foundational move.

“Regulations are ahead, industry is back,” Sajad says of Pakistan’s regulators. “Regulatory bodies in Pakistan are actually ahead of the curve.” RAST is evidence. It gives fintechs, telcos, and startups the same API access that banks have, instantly and free.

“The biggest challenge for non-banking industry is that when we go to a bank, they say this API is not available, or the other is not,” Sajad explains. RAST solves that by forcing standardization. “This platform is standardized. Don’t worry. We as government are giving you APIs, platform access, standardized with a guaranteed time transaction.”

The platform will connect smart meters, smart cars, smart fridges. Every entity gets an ID. Payments become instant, real-time, and programmable. Muzamil presses on government surveillance, but Sajad clarifies: “The government is more worried about the government’s system using this system. They can do a better job making sure that the budget, spending, government level systems improve.”

Cryptocurrency: not yet ready

When Muzamil asks about Bitcoin and blockchain, Sajad is clear: blockchain is foundational technology for traceability and contracts. Bitcoin is not.

“Bitcoin, five or six years ago, was 200 dollars. Today it’s 40,000 to 50,000. How fast rise and fall. My personal problem with Bitcoin is that because of its rise and fall, a lot of people lose their money,” Sajad says. For a common person whose money is in their hand, the volatility is unnatural.

Muzamil poses the China case: digital yuan backed by central banks, programmable for policy. “They take the underlying concept and have a regulated central bank-backed digital currency. Same concept.”

“These currencies will take a lot longer to become mainstream,” Sajad concludes. Even if they do, they may not be decentralized Bitcoin. They may be what governments build instead.

Patience is the edge

Muzamil wraps by asking what keeps Sajad optimistic. The answer is patience itself.

“When you are impatient, quickly and you end up doing it repetitively, you know, you don’t gain the value you perceive,” Sajad says. “That’s why we need to do it but do it right.”

The digital economy will come to Pakistan. But it will come on Pakistan’s timeline, not Silicon Valley’s. In that delay lies the real strategy: learning from every false step so the next generation of fintech works on the first try.