Pakistan's cash economy and the fintech fixing it

From Telenor to Easypaisa: building on a mobile revolution

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing an unusually large panel — four people around the table for the first time on Thought Behind Things. The first guest he turns to is Omar Moeen Malik, who carries the title CXO rather than CEO at Easypaisa. The reason, Omar explains, is structural: Easypaisa sits inside a microfinance bank, and the bank’s CEO is a separate person. Omar heads the Easypaisa product and reports up.

That framing matters because it sets up the rest of Omar’s story. He was not a hire brought in to run a mature product. He was part of the founding team in 2008, when the idea was still just a hypothesis borrowed from other markets.

“We were looking at how mobile phones were being used in different countries,” Omar says, “not just for calling and SMS, but for a lot of other things.” The examples he cites are M-Pesa in Kenya and GCash in the Philippines — markets where cash-based, third-world economies leapfrogged the card infrastructure that rich countries had built over decades. The logic was simple: Europe and the Americas were already on Visa and Mastercard. There was nothing to disrupt. But in Pakistan, where a mobile phone had gone from a luxury item to something every person carried within five years, the opportunity was enormous.

The numbers Omar lays out are stark. Pakistan has a population of 220 million, roughly 120 million adults, and only 20 to 30 million unique bank account users. The rest are either entirely unbanked or what he calls “under-banked” — they opened an account once and never went back because the experience was too difficult. “Bank account khoolna, usko chalana — woh bhi bahut mushkil kaam hai,” he says. The goal Easypaisa set for itself was to eliminate cash from the economy, and Omar makes the economic case for why that matters: a cash-on-delivery e-commerce order locks up capital until the courier returns, slowing the entire supply chain. Digital prepayment means the merchant can reorder inventory before the product even leaves the warehouse. “Aapki economy ka jo pahiya hai na, woh grease ho jaata hai.”

Easypaisa’s evolution: from money transfer to mini-app platform

Muzamil pushes Omar to explain what Easypaisa actually is today — wallet, bank account, or super app. The answer is that it has been all three at different points, and is now something newer.

The first phase, starting in 2008, was pure money transfer: sending cash from one agent shop to another, primarily for urban workers remitting money home. The second phase began around 2015 when smartphone penetration started climbing. Easypaisa launched an app, opened digital accounts, and built out bill payments, airtime top-ups, peer-to-peer transfers, and split-money features across all four telecoms. “In a way we have become a super app,” Omar says, “because now we are offering a lot of services.”

The third phase, which was live at the time of recording, is a platform model. Easypaisa has exposed its APIs to third parties and is allowing external apps to publish as mini-apps inside the Easypaisa interface. He gives the example of Grocer, a Lahore-based grocery delivery service that ported its app into Easypaisa so that customers never have to leave the wallet to complete a purchase. The payment at checkout becomes a single button press. The vision is a single app that handles e-commerce, ride-hailing, food delivery, government services, and anything else that requires a payment — without the user ever switching applications.

Breast cancer, taboo, and twenty years of Pink Ribbon

Muzamil then turns to Omar Aftab, who founded Pink Ribbon Pakistan. The origin story is personal. A colleague was diagnosed with breast cancer and, while undergoing treatment, was struck by how late other women were presenting at hospitals — fourth-stage cases, fungating tumours, conditions so advanced that patients could not sit in a waiting room without causing distress to those around them. She asked Omar Aftab to help her set up an awareness campaign. He did. She did not survive a recurrence. By then he was too invested to stop.

The scale of the problem he describes is significant. One in nine women in Pakistan is at risk of breast cancer. That translates to more than ten million women. Reported deaths run to roughly 40,000 per year, and Omar Aftab believes the actual number is higher because many cases never reach a hospital at all.

When Pink Ribbon formally launched its campaign in 2004, every television channel blacked it out. “Unhon ne kaha ji yeh jo b-word hai yeh hum TV par nahin le sakte.” The word “breast” was unsayable on air. That single fact explains why the organisation spent its first twelve to thirteen years doing almost nothing except trying to establish that breast cancer is a medical condition and that talking about it is necessary.

What makes breast cancer distinct, Omar Aftab explains, is that it is the only cancer whose early symptoms are external — a lump, a skin change, nipple discharge. It can be self-detected. And if it is caught early, survival rates exceed 90 percent. Those 40,000 annual deaths are not inevitable. They are the consequence of late diagnosis, which is itself the consequence of taboo.

The comparison he draws to India is striking. Pakistan’s breast cancer risk is one in nine. India’s is one in twenty-two. The two countries share a geography and a genetic heritage. Omar Aftab attributes much of the difference to lifestyle and food — specifically the use of steroids in poultry and livestock production, which creates hormonal imbalances that affect estrogen levels, which in turn are linked to breast cancer risk.

Pink Ribbon’s response has been holistic. Youth programmes in colleges and universities across Pakistan are the most effective awareness tool, because a session with 500 students sends information into 500 households. The organisation has also spent fifteen years advocating with government, which eventually produced the breast cancer centre at PIMS in Islamabad. At the time of recording, Pink Ribbon was setting up what it describes as Pakistan’s first dedicated breast cancer hospital in Lahore, with free diagnostics already running.

RIZQ: from a Facebook page to a food ecosystem

Huzaifa Ahmed, co-founder of RIZQ, tells a quieter origin story. He was a second-year student at LUMS when he and two friends — Musa and Hasan — noticed that food was being wasted around them while people nearby were going hungry. On a weekend, they created a Facebook page and posted their phone numbers, offering to collect surplus food and redistribute it. The first call came from a family on Jail Road in Lahore. “Idea aapne socha hai, woh manifest hone laga hai — wah kya badi baat hai,” Huzaifa recalls.

The LUMS community shared the page, it went viral within the campus network, and calls started coming in — sometimes with a jar of pickle, sometimes with toffees, sometimes with a full meal. A volunteer chapter formed. The first restaurant to come on board was Monal, whose Lahore branch was run by an alumnus. He told the three students he wanted to see how serious they were before committing. That question — how serious are you? — shaped how RIZQ approached everything that followed.

A mentor later reframed the entire project for them. The insight, as Huzaifa describes it, was that food is not just nutrition. It is the precondition for human potential. A child who is malnourished cannot focus on education, cannot build community, is more likely to turn to crime. Food wastage in a country with severe malnutrition is not an inefficiency. It is a social injustice. “Yeh toh maasre ki ek social injustice ka masla hai,” Huzaifa says.

That reframing sent RIZQ deeper into the supply chain. Restaurants waste food in buffet trays. Warehouses hold near-expiry stock. Farms lose produce to post-harvest logistics failures and price fluctuations. The problem is not just that surplus food exists — it is that the system has no mechanism to move it to where it is needed.

By the time of recording, RIZQ had three active programmes: RIZQ Bachao for food rescue, RIZQ Ration for subsidised food through smart cards issued to vetted families, and a subsidised meals programme. The smart card model is modelled loosely on India’s Aadhaar-linked ration system, with RIZQ exploring how to connect cardholders to nearby kirana stores rather than requiring them to travel to a central food bank.

Charity, mobile wallets, and the $2 billion question

Later in the discussion, Muzamil brings the three guests together around a single question: what happens when mobile wallets meet Pakistan’s charity sector?

Omar Moeen Malik opens with a number that reframes the conversation. The Pakistan Centre for Philanthropy has documented $2 billion in annual philanthropy in this country. Documented. The undocumented total — cash dropped in mosque collection plates, handed to people at traffic lights, given to visitors at the door — is far larger. “Hum log dete hain, and for different reasons,” Omar says. Religious obligation, social duty, personal belief that giving wards off misfortune. The giving culture is embedded. What is not embedded is any infrastructure to make that giving efficient, traceable, or scalable.

Easypaisa has signed up more than 35 charity organisations on its platform, allowing users to donate with a single tap. The constraint is compliance: charities that are not properly registered with the Pakistan Centre for Philanthropy or whose documentation is not in order cannot be listed, because Easypaisa is a licensed financial service and must meet state bank requirements.

Omar Moeen Malik describes seeing a QR code outside a mosque abroad, where worshippers could scan and donate at any time without anyone having to ask them directly. “Jab digital aap chale jaate ho toh aap logon ki jo izzat hai na, woh aap bade unko protect karte ho.” The dignity argument — that digital giving removes the awkwardness of being asked, or of asking — is one he returns to more than once.

Omar Aftab adds that COVID was the moment Pink Ribbon discovered how powerful digital channels actually were. The organisation had always relied on physical letters, couriers, and on-ground events for its Ramadan fundraising campaign. In 2020, all of that stopped. Donations did not fall. They rose, entirely through digital platforms including Easypaisa. “Woh saari possible hui EasyPaisa jaise platforms ke through.” That experience permanently shifted Pink Ribbon’s fundraising strategy toward digital-first.

Huzaifa echoes the same experience. In the last ten days of March 2020, RIZQ raised more than it had raised in the previous six months. All of it was digital. He is now building fundraising strategies that assume digital as the default, not the exception.

Subscription models, merchant limits, and the regulatory gap

Muzamil raises a practical problem that affects both charities and content creators: the state bank’s wallet limits cap monthly transactions at two lakh rupees for standard accounts, which is too low for organisations trying to run serious fundraising operations. He also asks whether a subscription model — where a donor commits a fixed monthly amount that recurs automatically — is possible on Easypaisa.

Omar Moeen Malik explains the history of the limits. When branchless banking launched in 2008, limits were set low deliberately, to minimise risk from accounts opened with minimal KYC. Over time, the state bank has revised them upward. The current structure has three tiers. A level-zero account, opened just with a CNIC number, allows 25,000 rupees per day and 50,000 per month. A level-one account, previously requiring a visit to an agent for biometric verification, now allows 50,000 per day and 200,000 per month — and can be upgraded entirely within the app using the phone camera to scan fingerprints against NADRA records.

The newest tier is the Aasaan Digital Account. A user takes a selfie, photographs the front and back of their CNIC, answers a few basic questions, and submits. Within two working days, after NADRA verification, the account is upgraded to a limit of ten lakh rupees per month, both sending and receiving. “Aap apni EasyPaisa app mein iOS ho ya Android ho abhi baithkar karein,” Omar says. No branch visit, no agent, no queue.

On subscriptions, Omar acknowledges the demand is real — charities with international donors constantly ask for recurring payment options — but notes that the mechanics are more complex than a single payment. A recurring instruction needs to handle failed payments, notify the user when funds are insufficient, and offer a clear opt-out. He does not rule it out but frames it as a product challenge still being worked through.

RAAST, QR codes, and the infrastructure underneath everything

Muzamil asks Omar to address three things at once: RAAST, the state bank’s fast payment system; QR code payments, which had been announced but not widely adopted; and whether the flood of new fintech players entering the market would fragment it or grow it.

On RAAST, Omar is direct. It is a fast payment switch, modelled on similar systems in roughly 35 countries. Its two core promises are that every payment is free and every payment is instant. A user creates a RAAST ID linked to their phone number, then associates that ID with whichever account or wallet they choose. Sending money to someone requires only their phone number. The receiving account does not matter — the money lands wherever the recipient has pointed their RAAST ID.

The contrast with the previous dominant method, IBFT through 1Link, is significant. IBFT charged fees, had frequent failures, and sometimes took twenty days to reverse a stuck transaction. RAAST has none of those problems.

On QR codes, Omar says the interoperable RAAST QR — one code at a merchant terminal that any wallet or banking app can read — was expected to deploy within two to three months of the recording. This would solve the problem Muzamil identifies: a merchant currently has to display ten different QR placards for ten different wallets. One code, any app. “Yeh issko kehte hain interoperability.”

On the question of too many players, Omar is unambiguous. “The more the merrier.” The opportunity in Pakistan is large enough that competition does not shrink the pie. Each new entrant is targeting a specific pain point — salary disbursement, credit scoring, retail payments, online checkout — and the combined effect is that more of the population gets served. “The people of Pakistan is what matters and the more options they have, the freedom that they have to choose x versus y, that is going to help.”

He closes with a forecast: Easypaisa took twelve to fourteen years to reach ten million active monthly customers. He does not expect the next ten million to take anywhere near that long. By 2025, he projects, 90 percent of phones in Pakistan will be smartphones, and 90 percent of the population will have access to some form of formal financial service. “Technology levels everything,” he says. A wealthy person and a poor person using the same mobile network are using the same infrastructure, the same systems, the same customer service channel. “Aap basically na social barriers break karte ho.”

By the end of the conversation, all three guests — Omar Moeen Malik, Omar Aftab, and Huzaifa Ahmed — land in the same place: cautious optimism about Pakistan’s next decade, grounded not in wishful thinking but in what they have each watched change in the years they have been working. Muzamil wraps the session at the ninety-minute mark, noting that the conversation could have run considerably longer.