State Bank of Pakistan Digital Payments

The State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) sits at the centre of the country's digital payments transformation. As the central bank, monetary authority and payment systems regulator, its policy choices set the pace at which digital payments displace cash, the terms on which fintechs can participate, and the long-run architecture of how PKR moves in and out of bank accounts, wallets and — increasingly — tokenised forms. This piece walks through the SBP's digital payments roadmap, the rails it oversees, its open banking direction, and where the central bank digital currency (CBDC) conversation sits.

The SBP has pursued a multi-year strategy to move retail payments off cash, reduce the cost of moving money inside Pakistan and open up the financial system to non-bank participants under appropriate supervision. The visible outputs include Raast as a real-time instant payment system, the longstanding inter-bank transfer infrastructure, licensing regimes for Electronic Money Institutions and Payment System Operators and Providers, and increasingly public engagement on open banking and CBDC.

The strategic through-line is that Pakistan's payments architecture is being deliberately modernised in layers. The SBP is not betting everything on a single rail. Raast handles retail-scale instant payments. Traditional inter-bank transfer infrastructure handles higher-value flows and legacy institutional payments. Licensed EMIs and digital wallets sit on top, offering consumer and merchant products. PVARA-regulated virtual asset activity is now emerging as an adjacent layer. The SBP's role is to ensure these layers interoperate, that consumer protection and AML controls scale with volume, and that monetary-policy transmission continues to work as the deposit base evolves. Our Pakistan digital finance overview places these layers in a single map.

The pace of change has accelerated. The SBP's posture over the last several years has shifted from gatekeeping to active orchestration: issuing guidance, licensing non-bank participants, and publishing roadmap signals that give fintechs a planning horizon. That planning horizon is what makes serious infrastructure investment tractable.

Raast is the marquee outcome of the SBP's digital payments strategy. Launched as a phased rollout with P2P flows first, followed by person-to-merchant and bulk-payment variants, it has become the primary instant payment rail in Pakistan. Its adoption curve — reported growth in transaction volume across consecutive quarters — has been steep, and it is now the default rail for consumer-initiated digital payments.

The operational characteristics matter. Raast is push-based, real-time and final, with alias-based addressing that removes IBAN friction from consumer flows. It is low-cost to the end user, which has made it viable for small-ticket, high-frequency payments that card rails never served well. And it is centrally operated by the SBP, which gives it both systemic importance and the supervisory proximity that comes with that.

Alongside Raast, Pakistan operates a mature inter-bank transfer ecosystem — traditionally under the IBFT (Inter Bank Fund Transfer) umbrella — that serves higher-value and scheduled transfers between bank accounts. The operational distinction is narrowing as Raast expands into bulk and higher-value segments, but the two rails continue to coexist and will likely continue to do so for the medium term.

For fintechs, the practical question is access. Direct Raast connectivity sits with participating institutions — typically licensed banks. Non-bank fintechs participate via sponsoring banks or licensed Payment System Operators and Providers, with commercial and compliance arrangements that mirror global sponsorship patterns. Our Raast integration guide walks through the architecture in detail.

Open banking is a policy direction rather than a fully-deployed regime in Pakistan today, but it is on the roadmap. The SBP has signalled intent to enable standardised, consent-based sharing of customer financial data with authorised third parties, under an arrangement that protects consumer privacy and holds participants to defined technical and security standards. The model is consistent with the international trajectory — the UK's Open Banking, the EU's PSD2, India's Account Aggregator framework — adapted to Pakistani market structure and regulatory reality.

The practical implications for fintechs, when open banking goes live, are material. Account-to-account payment initiation can be offered without card rails, account-information services enable credit underwriting and personal finance management built on first-party data, and embedded finance becomes tractable because an authorised third party can programmatically orchestrate a customer's bank accounts with consent. Combined with Raast as the instant-settlement leg and a mature identity layer anchored by NADRA, Pakistan will have a stack that looks structurally similar to the most advanced open-banking markets globally.

The build implication is that fintechs should design with open banking in mind now, even before the regime is fully operational. Data handling practices, consent management and customer-facing UX can be put in place so that open-banking flows drop in when the regulatory plumbing is complete.

Central bank digital currency is a live topic for the SBP, as it is for most major central banks globally. Public commentary from the SBP has acknowledged the work as part of a broader assessment of digital money options, rather than as a committed near-term issuance.

The policy questions any central bank has to answer before issuing a CBDC are well-known: wholesale, retail or both; account-based or token-based; direct-to-citizen or intermediated through banks; programmable or not; interoperable with existing payment rails and cross-border systems. The answer a central bank arrives at depends on what problem the CBDC is meant to solve. For Pakistan, the problems a CBDC could plausibly address include settlement finality and efficiency in inter-bank markets, programmable government payments and targeted subsidies, and potentially a digital-cash instrument for underbanked populations.

The alternative architectures for many of these use cases already exist or are emerging. Raast addresses retail instant payments today. A regulated PKR stablecoin under the PVARA regime could address programmable-money use cases without the SBP having to issue a direct-to-citizen CBDC. Our Pakistan stablecoin landscape piece explores that trade-off.

The reasonable expectation is that the SBP's CBDC work continues at a deliberate pace, with close observation of international pilots, and that any live issuance — if it happens — follows rather than leads the maturation of the regulated private stack.

A useful frame for builders is that the CBDC question is less about whether the SBP issues a digital currency and more about whether the overall payments architecture — Raast, regulated stablecoins, open banking, inter-bank transfer and identity — delivers the programmability, cost and inclusion outcomes that a CBDC would otherwise justify. If it does, the marginal case for a retail CBDC is weaker; if it does not, the case is stronger. The decision will be shaped by how well the existing rails perform in practice, which is another reason that building high-quality digital finance infrastructure in Pakistan has compounding returns.

Three practical implications follow for fintechs, banks and infrastructure providers active in Pakistan.

The first is that Raast is the baseline. Any product that moves PKR to or from consumers should assume Raast is the primary rail and design around alias-based flows and instant settlement. Retrofitting Raast later is more expensive than building with it from day one.

The second is that the regulatory perimeter is expanding in a structured way. The combination of SBP oversight of payment systems, PVARA oversight of virtual asset activity, and a maturing framework for EMIs, PSOs and PSPs means that there is a licensed path for most business models. Building an unlicensed product and hoping for regulatory silence is not a strategy.

The third is that the stack is composable. A production fintech in Pakistan today stitches together identity (anchored by NADRA, operated through services like our NADRA-backed KYC), payment rails (Raast and inter-bank transfer), regulated virtual asset infrastructure (where relevant, under PVARA), and open-banking primitives as they come online. The firms that will do best are the ones that treat this as a single integrated stack rather than as disconnected silos.

A notable feature of the SBP's recent approach is its willingness to let non-bank participants carry more of the product load. Licensed EMIs now operate digital wallet products at scale, acquirers run merchant acceptance networks on modern rails, and Payment System Operators and Providers compete on the technical layer between sponsor banks and end users. The SBP's posture is that a diverse ecosystem of regulated non-bank participants improves competition, drives innovation and reduces concentration risk, provided each participant is appropriately supervised.

For fintechs, this means that the licensed path is genuine. An EMI or PSO licence under the SBP's regimes gives a clear operating basis for a wide range of digital finance products, with defined capital, governance, technology and conduct expectations. The path is not trivial — these are substantive licences — but it is navigable for well-prepared applicants and it opens the door to the full set of SBP-regulated rails.

Bridge publishes ongoing analysis of Pakistan's digital finance stack. See our Pakistan hub for more, or contact Bridge to discuss a specific payments or infrastructure question.