Financial Inclusion: Karandaaz Pakistan and UN Alliance Launch Working Group for Digital Merchant Payments.

To accelerate the digitization of retail supply chains, Karandaaz Pakistan and the UN-hosted Better Than Cash Alliance have partnered to launch the National Merchant Payments Working Group.

Operating under the strategic guidance of the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP), this collaborative platform aims to address retail onboarding friction, resolve merchant processing bottlenecks, and scale digital payment adoption across Pakistan. The initiative will focus heavily on leveraging Raast P2M (Person-to-Merchant), the central bank’s instant, low-cost digital payment gateway.

Driving Retail Supply Chain Evolution via Raast P2M

This localized intervention seeks to eliminate cash dependencies within high-volume merchant ecosystems. By integrating structural technology frameworks with retail merchant touchpoints, the partnership directly targets everyday micro-transactions.

The strategic objectives and structural focus areas of the newly launched working group include:

• Reducing Onboarding Friction: Designing unified compliance and digital Know Your Customer (KYC) architectures to make it seamless for small-scale shopkeepers and micro-enterprises to adopt digital merchant accounts.
• Optimizing Raast P2M Adoption: Streamlining real-time QR code deployments and low-barrier digital merchant processing setups powered by the SBP’s flagship instant payment highway.
• Resolving Processing Bottlenecks: Facilitating close dialogue between commercial banks, fintech operators, and retail cartels to ensure high transactional success rates and near-zero merchant discount rates (MDR).
• Data-Driven Policy Formulation: Publishing specialized white papers and research insights to help state managers shape long-term consumer incentives for digital payment methods.

Transitioning Toward a Cashless Economy

“Digitizing retail merchant networks is the final frontier for deep-rooted financial inclusion in Pakistan. Bringing together the global execution strategy of the Better Than Cash Alliance alongside Karandaaz and the State Bank ensures that our retail sector has the digital infrastructure needed to unlock formal credit line access.”

Fintech ecosystem specialists note that while retail Person-to-Person (P2P) transfers have scaled dramatically across Pakistan, the mainstream retail trade still relies heavily on physical currency notes. By building a reliable, instant, and frictionless P2M loop, the state can bring vast chunks of undocumented cash circulation back into the formal financial reporting fabric, driving transparent business growth and sustainable domestic revenue collection.

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