Remittance apps deliver rupees. Pocket Money is betting Pakistanis want the dollars.

A conversation in Dallas about the financial reset

Muzamil records this one away from the studio. He is in Dallas for a conference, and while there he met a Pakistani founder building something he wanted to understand. The context comes from his recent episode with Faisal Aftab, who described a financial reset in which the digitisation of finance sits at the heart of Pakistan’s growth. Muzamil says many people are now talking about a sovereign debt crisis and the economic centre of gravity moving east. He expects that reset to change how we understand the economy, finance and work over the next five years.

He sets out the local news first. Pakistan has created a regulator for virtual assets, PVARA, and the State Bank has announced rules for the sector. The State Bank has also said that freelancers and IT companies can now keep 50 percent of their revenue in dollars and spend it anywhere in the world. Muzamil reads this as regulators accepting that Pakistani businesses are global by nature.

The guest is Moiz Jangda, founder and CEO of Pocket Money. Muzamil explains why the product caught his attention. The freelancers he meets through the channel share one complaint. Pakistanis have no control over the foreign platforms that hold their money. Accounts get banned, and money gets lost. He wants local founders who can be held accountable when things go wrong.

What PayPal could be for Pakistan

Moiz gives the short version. “Pocket Money is effectively what PayPal could be in Pakistan for emerging markets, starting with Pakistan,” he says. A user downloads the app, creates an account, and has their own named US dollar account to receive, spend and cash out.

Muzamil pushes on the PayPal comparison. Pakistanis often blame the missing PayPal for a weak IT industry, he says, but PayPal suits small gigs. India’s roughly $300 billion in services exports moves in the millions through structured banking. In Pakistan, things break at scale. He mentions a post he saw on X from someone whose client payment had been missing for six months because the bank would not acknowledge it had arrived.

Moiz says Pocket is aimed at the bigger picture. Freelancers are the first market because they receive dollars regularly, and Payoneer is the largest incumbent. A quick search on Google or Reddit, he says, shows how much people dislike Payoneer, which leaves a gap. But anyone can open an account today.

The broader problem comes from his own life. When there is a wedding among Pakistani families in Dallas or Austin, the clothes are bought from Pakistan. The money usually travels as cash. A cousin in Houston drives dollars over, someone carries them on a flight, and a driver delivers an envelope to a house in Pakistan. Moiz calls it inefficient and stressful. He says any American with ties to Pakistan has been asked by a relative to carry dollars home.

Muzamil asks whether that is just remittance. Moiz questions the label. If the sender and the recipient use the same currency, he asks, does it matter where the money goes? He shares what happened with his bank partner. The bank had an inward remittance agreement with Pocket. Only after launch, while filing tax withholdings with the State Bank, did the bank notice that the sender was the recipient. The State Bank is now deciding what such a transfer counts as, and the bank has held back those submissions until it decides.

A dollar balance for the auntie in Pakistan

Muzamil notes that sending money home already takes seconds on many remittance apps. They lock a rate and pay out from a local rupee account. So what is different?

Moiz’s answer is the currency the recipient ends up with. Wise and Remitly, he says, are excellent at getting rupees to people in Pakistan. He has not seen a widely trusted way to hold actual dollars. Take the auntie in Pakistan who sells the wedding outfits. Given the choice, he says, she would pick dollars nine times out of ten. With Pocket, the sender sends dollars without collecting her bank details or CNIC. She sees a dollar balance. She can cash out to rupees, spend on her card, or send it on. “Pocket is your dollar hub,” he says.

The dollars sit in bank accounts in the United States, because Pocket is a US-domiciled entity. Once PVARA approves, Moiz says, balances will move into segregated wallets for each user, still held in the US. The user will not see blockchains, only a dollar balance.

Muzamil then asks what Pakistan gets out of this, since the dollar may never touch the country. Moiz says the banks were thrilled to work with Pocket because it brings dollars in. The auntie mostly spends in Pakistan. If she uses the Pocket card locally, she pays no FX fee and the merchant receives rupees. To make instant cash-outs possible, Pocket has pre-funded liquidity at its partner bank. In effect the bank buys the dollars ahead of time, based on customer demand. Moiz says Pocket has already sold a significant amount of dollars to the bank this way.

The card is Pocket’s own, and Moiz says card spending in Pakistan uses the State Bank’s daily rate.

Where the fees hide

Muzamil raises the rate question. Remittance apps often beat the bank rate by two to four rupees, and stablecoin traders use a secondary market for still more.

Moiz starts with Payoneer. Users complain, he says, that if the dollar is at 279 rupees, Payoneer offers around 276 and also charges a 2 or 3 percent fee. It squeezes the rate and adds a flat charge.

He then explains how some apps appear to beat the bank. The State Bank incentivises inward remittance accounts, and for any transaction above $200 it pays an incentive that he puts at 20 Saudi riyals, settled monthly. An app can keep half and pass the other half back as what looks like a better exchange rate. “There’s a lot of room to be creative on that front,” he says.

Pocket offers two options. The standard cash-out gives the State Bank rate at parity, with Pocket buying the rupees at the end of each day. The instant option draws on the pre-funded rupees, so Pocket carries the risk of holding them and charges 1 percent.

That leads to the business model. Besides instant cash-out, Pocket offers instant deposits. ACH or wire transfers into the US take two to three days to settle. When the bank signals that funds are coming, Pocket can credit them immediately for a 1 percent fee. The third source is yield. Once stablecoins are in place through the PVARA sandbox, customer balances will earn yield. Moiz says he would like to share it with customers, but attitudes in Pakistan toward interest make that a separate psychological problem to solve.

Spending dollars out of Pakistan

Muzamil turns to outward spending, which he calls a nightmare for Pakistani businesses. He describes a home-based business owner who struggles to open a bank account, prove her business is real, or get a credit card. Without a card she goes to an agency that charges heavily. He adds that he thinks there is a 10 percent tax on dollar card spending. Fashion brands, he says, hit the annual limit on their cards and end up paying agencies too. A Pakistani business can end up paying more for the same Facebook ad than businesses abroad, while earning less.

Moiz says Pocket’s card is a US dollar Visa Signature debit card. When a user types it in online, they spend in dollars and the merchant receives dollars.

Paying an individual is harder. Today a Pocket user can send to another Pocket user. Sending by ACH or wire to an outside US bank account is on the near-term roadmap. Sending as a stablecoin to an address would depend on the sandbox approval.

Muzamil shares his own position. People assume he must be making a lot from Pakistan. “The fact is I’m not, because I don’t take any business from Pakistan,” he says. He cannot move that money out to where he needs to spend it. He keeps only enough there to pay his team.

Moiz thinks that has to change. People in Pakistan, he says, struggle to pay for AI tools, Figma and Notion, or even a Peacock subscription to watch the Premier League. If access to these tools needs another currency, the State Bank and government face a choice. They can hold people back out of fear of capital flight, or they can allow it and watch it. He says he would be surprised if the government kept Pakistanis out of the global economy.

Capital controls and the hawala question

Muzamil plays devil’s advocate. He points to Turkey, where free access to dollars, he says, left the local currency worth little. Fuel and much else is priced off the dollar, so a rush into dollars makes petrol, diesel and everything else more expensive, and the poorest are hurt most. Too much control, on the other hand, props up a hawala market. He cites a government minister who said recently that $100 billion had moved out of the country over the last two or three years. In Muzamil’s estimate that is about three times annual exports and three times annual remittances. He believes most of it was moved by a small group of very rich people.

His middle path is to let people convert rupees into dollars, but only for specific services at first. Because the government gets the data, it can tax the spending the way it taxes anything else.

Moiz calls that the right way to do it. Opened up overnight during a scare, he says, the rupee could fall freely and Pakistan would be in another Turkey situation. But the money is going to move anyway, he says. Most people have at some point used hawala for genuine reasons. Opening regulated channels one use case at a time lets the State Bank monitor spending. It also helps people who will not take the hawala risk. “Look, dude, I just want to watch Premier League,” he says of the person hunting for a cousin with dollars in Houston.

Stablecoins in the background

Pocket has applied to the PVARA sandbox. Moiz describes stablecoins as one more spoke on the dollar hub. With approval, a user could receive USDT or USDC across the nine blockchains that support them and see a single dollar balance.

He gives an example of the speed gain. A PayPal user in the US can already pay a Pocket user today, because each Pocket user has a named virtual account. That transfer takes about three days on traditional rails, with correspondent banks in between. Stablecoins cut out that noise and settle instantly. He calls them a very late solution to the problem of correspondent banking and SWIFT.

Muzamil shares his own first try. Late last year a client in Singapore offered to pay him in a stablecoin. He had studied the subject but never used it, and he ended up asking his brother for help with wallets and long addresses. Most users, he says, will not put up with that. Should stablecoins work in the background while the front stays money in, money out?

Moiz agrees completely. Nobody cares which blockchain their dollars are on, he says. The moment he says “USDC” or “blockchain” to his mother, he has lost her. Then he would be back to the problem he set out to solve ten years ago, with family asking him for help sending money to Pakistan. “Stablecoins are effectively dollars, and that’s how they will be in Pocket,” he says.

Why a name like Muhammad breaks onboarding

Pocket is focused on Pakistan for now. Moiz says competitors made the mistake of tackling too many countries at once and never gave the culture and trust enough attention. He adds that Pocket is launching in Canada, the US and Australia over the next two or three weeks, because Pakistanis are everywhere.

His long-term goal is that sending, receiving and spending money should be “the most boring thing you do every day.” Give someone your phone number, and the money arrives in ten seconds, whatever their currency. He admits that raising money for a Pakistani fintech app is not easy. He says the numbers are there, and that the first week since launch has shown it. If the only incumbent is Payoneer, he says, Pocket should be fine, as long as it avoids the same traps.

Then he gives the example that shows why Pakistan is hard. Identity verification platforms for KYC are built around Western users. He says he has spent the past 96 hours fighting what he calls systemic discrimination against the most common name in the world. Every Muhammad or Abdul Rehman who tried to onboard went straight to manual review, and the same 63 AML hits came up for each of them. “You telling me that all 16 Muhammads are the same terrorist?” he asks.

Pocket has to show due diligence under its AML reporting rules, so his team checks each hit. Some of the .gov.pk pages behind the hits cannot be opened from the US, even through a VPN, so staff in Pakistan check them. In the worst case, he says, the platform’s AI analyst judged that a Muhammad was likely a terrorist. The linked website turned out to be a page for downloading an Android video game.

Muzamil asks whether this is a Pakistan problem or a Muhammad problem. Moiz says the platforms weigh many signals: where the ID is from, whether a VPN is in use, and the country of origin. Put together a Pakistani CNIC, a VPN and the name Muhammad, and in Pocket’s experience up to the day before the recording, the chance of a flag was 100 percent.

Trust, bans and what comes next

Muzamil asks the question his audience cares about most. Even after a user passes KYC, platforms like Payoneer ban people midway, and those people cannot reach their funds. How does Pocket stop that, and how does it avoid ghosting people when it happens?

“Tech can’t solve this problem,” Moiz says. First, Pocket has explicit approval from its US bank partner to provide named accounts to its customers. Both sides knew that the bank would have to adjust its risk appetite for customers it has never onboarded before. That willingness is written into the contract, he says, so the bank cannot suddenly walk away and leave customers’ balances stranded. Second, the bank uses the same kind of identity platform and will see the same 63 hits. So Pocket keeps a close line open with the bank to work through each case.

He is clear about what users hold. Each user gets a named virtual US account. These are not FDIC-insured deposit accounts, which in the US require a social security number or proof of residency.

Muzamil looks further ahead. Pakistani banks, he says, are risk-averse because they can park deposits in government bonds, so nobody serves the private sector. Could a freelancer who has received $6,000 on the first of every month for three years one day get a credit card or a dollar mortgage?

Moiz says that is the concrete goal. Underwriting needs transaction history, and there are established methods once you have it. He adds investing in the US stock market, and in any financial vehicle a user chooses, because it is the user’s money. He says Pocket needs about six months of transaction history across a broad base of customers before its risk engine can start underwriting.

On support, Moiz says trust is the first thing Pocket has to earn. The team is six people, and all six answer a WhatsApp support line all day. He plans to spend about a month in Pakistan starting in ten days, with a launch event in Karachi.

Muzamil closes by asking viewers to open an account, test it, and send their feedback to the team. He believes Pakistanis should support Pakistan-led fintech rails. In his view, banking in Pakistan is a data problem, and the more people use these products, the faster the gaps get fixed.