By Staff Reporter
KARACHI: Pakistan accelerated its shift toward a cashless economy in the second quarter of fiscal 2026, with digital channels accounting for 92% of all retail transactions, up from 88% a year earlier, the State Bank of Pakistan said.
The central bank’s Quarterly Report on Payment Systems, released on Thursday, showed 3.4 billion retail transactions took place in the October-to-December period. That was an 8% increase from the previous quarter, while the value of those deals rose 7% to 167 trillion rupees ($600 billion). Digital payments alone reached 3.1 billion transactions worth 64 trillion rupees, the report said, reflecting broader adoption across consumer and business activity.
Mobile banking applications continued to dominate the landscape. Apps offered by branchless banking providers, commercial banks and electronic money institutions processed 2.6 billion transactions — 83% of all digital volume — valued at 40 trillion rupees. Those flows supported person-to-person transfers, bill payments, and both online and in-store merchant transactions using accounts or digital wallets. Internet banking posted steady gains, with transaction volume climbing 11% and value jumping 22%.
Raast Instant Payment System Maintains Momentum
The central bank’s Raast instant-payments platform kept up its strong expansion, clearing 645.7 million transactions valued at 18.5 trillion rupees. Person-to-person transfers rose 13% to 603 million deals worth 15.7 trillion rupees. Person-to-merchant payments increased to 33.6 million transactions amounting to 167.6 billion rupees.
Government and corporate users processed more than 9 million bulk payments through Raast, totaling 2.6 trillion rupees, the fastest-growing segment and a sign of accelerating adoption for official and business disbursements.
Cards, ATMs and Branch Network Expand
The total number of payment cards in circulation climbed to 66.7 million. Debit cards accounted for 87% of the stock, credit cards 5%, with the balance made up of social-welfare and prepaid cards. Point-of-sale terminals and e-commerce activity using cards handled roughly 1.7 million transactions a day. A nationwide network of 20,976 automated teller machines processed 277 million withdrawals, deposits and other transactions valued at 4.9 trillion rupees.
Over-the-counter services remained significant. Pakistan’s 20,143 bank branches executed 138 million transactions worth 102 trillion rupees, while 763,262 banking agents facilitated 135 million deals amounting to 0.9 trillion rupees. Those agents, spread across urban and rural areas, continued to play a key role in cash deposits, withdrawals, fund transfers and bill payments.
The report also covered high-value real-time gross settlement (RTGS) transactions conducted through formal banking channels, though it provided no new aggregate figures for that segment. Taken together, the data illustrate Pakistan’s ongoing transition toward a more inclusive, efficient and digitally enabled payments landscape, the State Bank said in its statement.
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