Topic hub

Digital Payments

Digital payments in Pakistan move across several rails at once. Raast, the State Bank of Pakistan’s instant payment system, connects banks and non-bank providers for real-time account-to-account transfers. Wallets, cards, QR codes and agent networks handle everyday spending at merchants, while acquirers and card schemes settle the resulting transactions between issuers, merchants and payment service providers. Each rail carries its own rules on fees, transaction limits, settlement timing and who is liable when a payment fails or is disputed.

This hub collects reporting on how those rails operate and how they are governed. Themes include interoperability between bank accounts and wallet balances; merchant acceptance, point-of-sale terminals and QR codes; fraud, chargebacks and dispute handling; and the circulars, licensing conditions and consumer-protection expectations from the State Bank of Pakistan and the Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan that shape product design and pricing.

Stories listed here come from the live news feed after relevance filtering, so off-topic items never appear in the section. Where an item is aggregated from another publisher, the card links out to that publisher’s original report; original analysis, written and reviewed by the editorial desk with its sources named, sits in the editorial section.