Few places feel as resolutely analogue as a government office in Pakistan. Yet it was at a NADRA centre, during a routine ID card renewal, that Pakistan’s digital shift became unmistakably real.
When it came time to pay, I was told the fee could only be transferred via Raast. No cash. No card. As an overseas Pakistani without access to Raast, I paused. Less out of frustration and more surprise.
It was a minor inconvenience, but an instructive one. This exchange said more than any policy announcement could: Pakistan has moved past trial runs in digital payments and begun embedding them into everyday systems.
Across cities and towns, digital transfers are now routine. From ride hailing drivers to domestic workers, instant bank transfers and mobile wallets have become everyday tools. Digital transactions now account for close to 90 percent of retail payment volumes, reflecting real progress on building interoperable, low cost infrastructure at national scale.
In the language of Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI), Pakistan has built a functioning “Payments layer”, one of the core pillars of what is increasingly described as the “Pakistan Stack.”
Payments as Proof of Capacity
Pakistan’s experience with digital payments demonstrates something often overlooked in reform debates: capacity exists when incentives and governance are aligned. Under the leadership of the State Bank of Pakistan, Raast has enabled instant, low cost transfers across banks and wallets, with growing adoption by both private citizens and government agencies.
This success is not trivial. Payments systems are complex. They require trust, uptime, coordination and regulatory clarity. Pakistan has shown it can design and operate such infrastructure when authority is clear and standards are shared.
But DPI is not only about moving money.
The Missing Layers: Records and Data Exchange
While Pakistan has digitized payments rapidly, it continues to govern assets, ownership and contracts through fragmented and often paper based systems. Land records remain dispute prone. Procurement processes lack end-to-end traceability. Company and asset registries sit in silos across institutions and provinces.
This is where the Pakistan Stack currently breaks; not at payments, but at records.
The recent establishment of the Pakistan Digital Authority (PDA) and the notification of the National Data Exchange Layer (NDEL) regulations are important steps. The NDEL is intended to act as the country’s data middleware, the pipe that allows systems to talk to one another, enabling a bank to verify a land title or a court to confirm a corporate filing in real time.
Yet technology alone cannot solve what unreliable underlying data does not support. If underlying records are unreliable, digitizing access merely accelerates uncertainty. The result is a structural mismatch: money moves digitally, but trust in records does not.
For businesses and investors, this gap matters more than incentives. Faster payments cannot compensate for disputed ownership or opaque approvals. Risk is priced not at the payment layer but at the registry.
Blockchain beyond the Crypto Debate
This is where blockchain becomes relevant and also often misunderstood.
Public debate has largely framed blockchain through the lens of speculative crypto markets. That chapter is increasingly settled. The more durable value of blockchain lies in something far less glamorous: securing records.
At its core, blockchain is a method for creating tamper resistant, verifiable registries shared across multiple parties. When applied to land records, company registries, procurement logs or credentials, it reduces discretion, limits retroactive changes and simplifies audits. Used this way, blockchain doesn’t replace institutions but reinforces them.
Its adoption has often been delayed because it sounds more complex than it is. In practice, its most effective public sector uses are basic: ensuring records cannot be quietly altered and that multiple agencies rely on a single source of truth. Treated as back-end infrastructure rather than a headline technology, blockchain is closer to a database upgrade than a radical experiment.
This approach is already visible globally. In UAE, blockchain was deployed across government workflows to reduce paperwork, processing time and operational costs. Estonia’s digital state rests on secure population, land and business registries that allow government systems to operate with trust by default. In India, it was the linking of identity and payments to interoperable registries, rather than apps or platforms, that reduced leakage and improved service delivery at scale.
A Realistic Opportunity for 2026
Pakistan is not starting from zero. We have national identity coverage via NADRA and widespread digital payments via Raast. The question for 2026 is whether the PDA can successfully operationalize the NDEL to connect these elements into a coherent system.
DPI is often summarised as identity, payments and data. Pakistan’s weakest link is the third: trusted, interoperable registries. This is not primarily a funding problem as maintaining inefficiency is already expensive. Nor is it a literacy problem. Digitizing and verifying records at scale requires a workforce, creating technical jobs aligned with Pakistan’s demographic profile.
The harder constraint is institutional coordination. Records reform reduces the gatekeeper power of individual offices. It requires shared standards across provinces and agencies. That is a governance challenge but one made more feasible now that the payments and identity layers are already operational.
Completing the Story
Pakistan’s success with digital payments shows what is possible when reform is approached as infrastructure. The next phase is quieter but more consequential: fixing how the state records reality.
If land titles are reliable, capital flows. If procurement is auditable, costs fall. If company ownership is verifiable, confidence rises. As Pakistan looks toward 2026, the most productive agenda is not about launching new platforms. It is about completing the Pakistan Stack, linking identity and payments to trustworthy records through the NDEL.
Pakistan has already digitized money. The next step is digitizing trust.
By Amna Usman Chaudhry
Author Bio: Amna Usman Chaudhry is a financial economist and frontier technology leader focused on digital finance, public infrastructure and emerging technologies. She is a graduate level lecturer with teaching experience in London and Dubai and has advised international and UN affiliated initiatives on digital finance, technology governance and inclusion. She has been recognized twice on Innovate Finance’s Women in FinTech Powerlist. Her work examines how digital systems shape economic trust, public institutions and governance outcomes.
