The BNPL startup targeting Pakistan's unbanked majority

From a movie fund to a BNPL marketplace

The episode opens with Muzamil asking Arif Lakhani how one person ends up working across film production, consumer electronics, and a fintech startup simultaneously. Lakhani’s answer is disarmingly simple: “I look for those opportunities. Fact is that they’ve all come to me one with the other.”

The film chapter began in 2017 when a friend approached him about a movie fund. The anchor investor — one of Pakistan’s largest cinema screen owners — pulled out the moment Indian films were banned, because the ban wiped out roughly 70 percent of cinema footfall. Lakhani was already too deep in conversations about a film called Perchi to exit, so he went in as an independent producer. Between 2017 and the recording date he had co-produced two films and two dramas. He describes the drama business as close to running a factory: a script is pre-approved by the channel, the cast and locations are locked, and the producer’s main job is making sure the on-ground production manager does what he is told. On returns, he is direct — dramas yield roughly 25 percent year over year because the sale happens before the shoot. Films are “completely unpredictable.”

Why Pakistani dramas are a pre-sold product

Muzamil presses on the production process, and Lakhani explains a structural quirk that surprises many outsiders. In Pakistan, a drama is sold to the channel before a single frame is shot. The channel approves the script, the director, and the locations. Nine hours of footage are shot each day; the channel edits that down to roughly 34 minutes of broadcast content. Producers are paid per broadcast minute, not per hour of footage delivered.

He also touches on the video-on-demand question — whether Netflix or similar platforms represent the next frontier. His view is cautious. When he spoke to Netflix around 2018, they cited only 50,000 paying Pakistani users versus five million in India and asked why they should commission local content. His counter-argument, which Muzamil builds on, is that Pakistan’s top-tier digital creators — TikTokers, YouTube personalities — already have massive, monetisable audiences and could pull subscribers onto an OTT platform if cast in an original show. Lakhani finds the logic sound but notes that the acceptance of digital-first talent on cinema screens or television has not yet arrived.

The 27-year backstory behind Qist Bazaar

Lakhani joined a small company in Karachi in 1995 — three founders, a handful of staff, and a simple idea: divide the cash price of a computer into six installments and let more people buy. They advertised at bus stops with ten-paisa brochures. By the early 2000s they were distributing IBM and Acer computers across Pakistan, had computerised the Karachi and Lahore stock exchanges, and had placed thousands of machines in Habib Bank and UBL. A 1998 newspaper ad — still on their LinkedIn — offered a top-of-the-line 32MB RAM, 4GB hard drive machine for 4,000 rupees per installment.

Qist Bazaar, formally launched in November 2021, is the online version of that same idea. “Easy words mein, Qist Bazaar is buy now pay later for the unbanked,” Lakhani tells Muzamil. The target customer earns between 25,000 and 50,000 rupees a month and has no credit history, no bank relationship, and no way to buy a fridge or a phone in a single transaction.

The customer the banks won’t let through the door

This is the section of the conversation that carries the most weight. Lakhani describes a visit to Qist Bazaar’s facilitation centre on I.I. Chundrigar Road — the heart of Pakistan’s banking district — with a senior banker friend. A customer walked in with his daughter to help him place an online order. The banker asked him why he hadn’t simply gone to one of the towers next door. The customer’s reply, which Lakhani quotes directly: “The cashier won’t shake my hand.”

“This is not even like a mindset issue — it’s a fact,” Lakhani says. The man earned 75,000 rupees a month. He was not poor by any conventional measure. He simply did not belong to the social network that Pakistani bank branches were built to serve.

Lakhani’s argument is that the common person is, statistically, the most reliable borrower. When he and his partners were selling IBM laptops on installments in the 1990s, the defaults came disproportionately from the wealthier clients — the ones whose guards wouldn’t let the collection team through the gate and whose secretaries wouldn’t put calls through to the boss. “Jab hum yeh IBM laptops dena start kiye, honestly is par humein zyada bada masla hua — because jin gharon mein yeh ja rahi thi, un gharon mein guard andar jaane nahi deta aapko.”

How the product actually works — and what Sharia compliance requires

Muzamil asks for a transparent walkthrough of the Qist Bazaar process, including any caveats. Lakhani obliges in detail.

A customer goes online, enters their name, address, CNIC number, and employer. A call centre agent follows up. An offline paper contract — written in Urdu — lists the total price, down payment, installment amount, and payment date. The salary figure is self-declared; Qist Bazaar does not validate it. The customer signs. That evening, a Rider delivery person arrives in uniform — deliberately so that neighbours do not see anything unusual — and the customer pays the advance only when the product is physically in front of them. Not a rupee changes hands before delivery.

On Sharia compliance, Lakhani explains the three conditions he has confirmed with scholars who sit on the boards of Meezan Bank, Habib Bank, and UBL: the price must be fixed before the sale, there must be no late-payment charges, and there must be no ambiguity in the contract. Qist Bazaar is awaiting its NBFC licence from SECP; once granted, the formal Sharia certificate will follow. The effective annual rate works out to roughly 24 to 26 percent IRR depending on the down payment — but there is only one price, and it is stated upfront.

Ninety percent of repayments arrive digitally through JazzCash or EasyPaisa. The system sends a reminder five days before each installment is due. Lakhani explicitly rules out auto-deduction: “I would not do that — because I know being on the other side. Tankhwah aaye aur khata kat jaaye.” A gig worker’s income does not arrive on a fixed date, and the product should flex around that reality.

NPL under 0.5% — and why the guarantor is the mechanism

When a customer misses two consecutive payments, Qist Bazaar classifies them as a defaulter — a stricter threshold than the six months most banks use. Current NPL sits below 0.5 percent. Muzamil asks what actually happens when someone genuinely cannot pay.

The answer involves two layers. First, a call centre agent contacts the customer. If that fails, a representative visits the home and activates the guarantor — a person who co-signed the original contract. “Normally our past says that 99.9% cases wahan par solve ho jaate hain.” If neither works, the product can be repossessed: the delivery rider withholds the original box for the first six installments precisely to preserve resale value. But Lakhani frames repossession as a last resort that hurts everyone, including Qist Bazaar, because a returned product without its box loses significant value and the customer’s down payment is already gone.

The deeper incentive structure is forward-looking. The website states explicitly that a customer who completes one purchase is automatically eligible for the next. “Whoever comes to us tells us chaar cheezein chahiye. And he is told: ek hi mil sakti hai.” The promise of future access is, in practice, a stronger enforcement mechanism than any legal threat.

Refurbished laptops, gaming exports, and the tool-versus-consumption argument

Sixty-five percent of early Qist Bazaar orders were mobile phones — a surprise even to the founders. But the product Lakhani is most animated about is the refurbished laptop. It is now the second-highest-selling item on the platform, despite being largely absent from every other installment seller in Pakistan. His reasoning is direct: 100,000 laptops enter Pakistan every month, but almost none reach individuals. They go to businesses and government.

He tells Muzamil about a gaming panel he attended the day before recording, where four or five young founders mentioned average revenues of ten million dollars per person — constrained not by demand but by State Bank restrictions on sending advertising dollars abroad to publish their games. And then there is the story of a customer who bought a laptop from Lakhani’s original Karachi shop on installments years ago, went on to build a gaming company, and is now one of Pakistan’s four largest game exporters.

“A NED graduate — not out of LUMS or GIK or Stanford — left us after three months because a foreign client was paying him $150 a week. Beat that.” At 210 rupees to the dollar, $500 a week becomes five lakh rupees a month. The laptop is not a consumer indulgence. It is the entry point to the export economy.

Muzamil adds his own observation: fridge sales in Pakistan are down 25 percent year over year despite a growing population and record heat waves. Motorcycle sales are down. The problem is not that people do not want these things. The problem is that they cannot pay for them in a single transaction, and no formal institution will bridge that gap. Lakhani’s response: “In a country where inflation is more than 15%, should I wait for that day when I have money to buy every damn thing in my life?”

Credit scoring, data partnerships, and the road to a 10,000-rupee credit card

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil steers toward the macroeconomic architecture that makes any of this scalable. Credit scoring is the missing piece. Pakistan’s banks built their data on a tiny, salaried population and gathered it in primitive ways — a salary slip, a utility bill. The unbanked 70 percent have no file anywhere.

Lakhani points to two credit rating agencies recently approved by the State Bank that will serve as central repositories. Once Qist Bazaar receives its NBFC licence, it will be legally required to report all customer data to those agencies. “Yeh sirf mere liye acha nahi hai, yeh sabke liye acha hai.” He is also in active conversations with Dastgir (a shopkeeper-financing startup) and Roze (a payroll platform) about sharing verified customer data rather than making every new lender start from scratch.

The long-run vision is to use Qist Bazaar as a graduation ramp into formal banking. “Hamari capacity hai, hum home loan nahi de paayenge. Now let’s target them, let’s make something out for them — maybe a form of a das hazaar rupee credit card. Why not give everyone a das hazaar rupee credit card?”

When Muzamil asks how Lakhani sees Pakistan in 2050, the answer is characteristically unsentimental. Population control is the single most important variable. Every government tries to do slightly better than the last one. The best economies in the world have corruption — the difference is they take care of the common person first. “Karne do unko corruption. Till they can take care of you and I as well.” And the numbers from Qist Bazaar itself are, he says, the most honest signal available: 250 customers in the first month, 1,500 last month, roughly 2,000 this month. “Isn’t this a good sign? Because these people, if we were not there, I think woh in cheezon mein nahi hote.”