The $10,000 grant and why women are Pakistan's missing half

A watch that pays, and a country still counting cash

Muzamil opens with a confession dressed up as an observation. He has just moved to Dubai, his phone is switched off, and he is paying for groceries with the watch on his wrist. Cash gave way to card, card gave way to the watch, and somewhere in that progression he realised the world had moved further than he had assumed. The thing that surprised him most was learning that the formalisation of payments — a topic he had filed under boring banker talk — sits close to the core of how economies actually develop.

Umar Khan, Visa’s country manager for Pakistan and Afghanistan, takes the cue and lifts it one notch further: you can already pay with a ring. The point is not the gadget. It is that the channels keep multiplying while the underlying job stays the same — moving money from today to tomorrow, from saving to spending to borrowing — and that how easily a country can do that shapes the kind of businesses it can run and the efficiency it can carry.

What follows is less a fintech pitch than a steady argument about a country that keeps being told its cashless future is imminent and keeps experiencing it as not-quite-here.

The dip that wasn’t a dip

The despondency in the room is named early. Muzamil voices the average listener’s frustration: ten years of hearing that wallets will arrive, that cash will die, that the street vendor will scan a QR like in India — and ten years of it not quite landing.

Umar’s correction is precise. Digital payments did not reverse after COVID. The first three quarters of 2023, by State Bank figures he cites, ran past a hundred million point-of-sale transactions, with terminals growing at four to five percent and five new digital banking licences freshly approved. What changed under economic pressure was ticket size, not direction: where ten people once made ten thousand rupees of digital payments, now fifteen people make the same ten thousand. Consumption is squeezed, but acceptance is still climbing.

His framing for measuring it is the most useful thing he says about progress. Compare three months to three months and you see almost nothing. Compare your own daily life pre-COVID to now — the plumber, the food-delivery rider, the corner shop — and the shift is obvious. Most of those people now hold wallets. Six months ago the same rider was still telling him it was hard to pull cash out of an ATM. The transformation is real; it is just slow enough to be invisible at close range.

What “money should be easy” actually means

Asked for a ten-year outlook, Umar refuses the tidy version. He keeps returning to the word “multilayer” — administration, structural economics, literacy and infrastructure all bear on the same problem, and not all of it sits inside anyone’s control. What he will commit to is a sentence: in ten years, money should be easy. Spending, earning, saving, borrowing for a business or for consumption — all of it more efficient, simpler, and cheaper than it is today. The rails are one component of that, not the whole answer.

His favourite illustration is the neighbourhood shop. You WhatsApp the corner store for milk and a Coke Zero, it arrives, you say you’ll pay later, the shopkeeper writes it in his ledger and waits three or four days for his own working capital to come back. Convert that into a payment link or a keyword payment and three things improve at once: the shopkeeper is paid instantly, your experience is cleaner, and the cash that was trapped in his ledger is freed. Several startups, he notes, are already chipping at exactly this from different angles.

On Raast and the promised single QR, he is candid: the State Bank has done remarkable work, Visa has tools that can complement it, and conversations are active. But he points at developed markets to set expectations — in Dubai one person pays by watch, another by ring, another by card, another taps a phone but still enters a PIN out of habit. There is no single payment method anywhere. The needle moves through many instruments at once, not one silver rail.

Iman Urooj and the accident that became a career

Iman Urooj’s route into the conversation is the other half of the story. Born and raised in Karachi, she studied history and economics at NYU, then joined the team setting up its Abu Dhabi campus — one of the first thirteen people on the ground, and, by her own account, the preferred tour guide who sold Harvard and Dartmouth visitors on the idea of a university in the Middle East. That, she realised later, was when she learned she liked selling.

She honed it in a father-daughter food-trading business bridging Latin American and European suppliers with Middle Eastern markets, and sharpened her instincts further at an MIT entrepreneurship bootcamp she still mentors for. The lesson she keeps from it is one she thinks Pakistanis especially need: learn to look at problems as if they were opportunities.

Safepay was almost accidental. During COVID, with her own travel grounded, her father suggested she help two friends who had started a payments company find merchants over the summer. She got sucked in, left the family business, and became COO. Safepay’s job, stripped to one line, is to help Pakistani businesses accept online payments from across the world.

Why women are the economy’s missing half

The conversation’s spine is financial inclusion, and Iman makes the economic case before the moral one. If women joined the economy on equal footing with men, she says, research puts the lift at six percent of global GDP. Inclusion is good for everyone, not a favour to anyone. She meets women entrepreneurs constantly, running real businesses; what they lack is not capability but access, mentoring, and a good network.

Muzamil presses on the specifically Pakistani friction — the constant dependency, the messages he gets from women who want to earn from home but hit a wall at “how do I actually get paid,” the tangle of “this is my husband’s account, that’s another account” that both blocks them and invites abuse of the system. Iman’s answer is the internet as equaliser: you can learn a trade on YouTube, sell from home, and reach the global economy without leaving the house. And the prize she keeps pointing at is the diaspora — a buying base larger than many countries’ whole populations, already purchasing Pakistani apparel and wedding wear from abroad. The best thing the diaspora can do, she says, is buy from Pakistan, and digital payments are what let a home-run brand close that sale.

She has lived the validation loop too. Safepay was the only Pakistani fintech in Visa’s Everywhere Initiative, up against startups from Ethiopia, Georgia and Nigeria — several solving the same problem Safepay solves at home — and it won the audience award and $10,000, a campaign she ran like an election, rallying her global family to vote.

She’s Next, and the $10,000 on the table

The grant in the episode’s title belongs to a Visa program called She’s Next, coming to Pakistan for the first time. Umar lays out the shape of it plainly: a $10,000 financial grant plus a year of mentorship, run in Pakistan with HBL, open to women entrepreneurs from any part of the economy — artisans, e-commerce, fintech, no restriction. The criteria are deliberately simple: a Pakistan resident, a business with at least 25% women ownership operating in Pakistan (it can serve any market), and roughly $5,000 in minimum annual revenue.

That revenue floor is a design choice, not a gate. The program is for businesses that have already broken the first barrier and found product-market fit — closer to an accelerator than an incubator, as Muzamil puts it — and the mentorship blends local operators who understand team-building and leadership with Visa’s global assets, from business-model canvases to customer-engagement playbooks.

Umar grounds it in evidence. A Visa survey behind the program found that 40% of respondents still believe women can’t handle leadership or high-pressure decisions, even as the women in everyone’s daily life — the mothers, the sisters, the doctors — carry loads most men could not. He points to Morocco, where a marketplace called Neole won a $10,000 grant, then a further $20,000 from a Visa Foundation program, and tripled artisans’ returns by giving them market access and basic business skills they had never been taught. The impact, he stresses, shows up downstream: in how those women reinvest in their families and communities.

Partnership, not permission

The episode’s most personal stretch is Muzamil’s own story, offered as proof. His wife started an e-commerce business in 2019 selling printed planners — a product he, a computer-science major, privately doubted. He did one thing: he trusted her, took the operations seat, and let her set the strategy. By 2021 that business had bought the family’s first car, renovated a dead 1980s building floor by floor, and built the very office the podcast is recorded in.

But he pushes past the feel-good version. When his wife’s revenue grew, she was the one who held the fort so he could step back and realign his own work — and his earnings today, he says, are many times his last salary in 2018. The point he hammers for the men listening is that this is not charity dressed as empowerment. It is partnership, and it cuts both ways: men rarely get the space to chase their own path either, and a working partner is what creates it.

Iman lands the same note from her own life. The greatest gift her father gave her, she says, was telling her he never wanted her to depend on anyone — not even him. He rooted for her. “You will never know till you jump,” he told her before Safepay. Her advice to the men watching is to be champions for the women in their lives, and to listen to them, because they carry insight and buying power men simply don’t — roughly 80% of e-commerce traffic, Muzamil notes, is driven by women, and it will be women who understand women best.

The most expensive thing to leave on the table

Umar closes the economic argument with the figure that frames the whole episode. From Myanmar’s tea shops and retail counters staffed almost entirely by women, to Scandinavia where women drive not just the economy but the arts and opinion-making, he has watched what equal participation looks like in practice. Picture, he says, women participating in the global economy on equal footing with men, and the impact runs up to $30 trillion by 2028.

That is the quiet thesis underneath the grant, the rails, and the personal stories. Pakistan is trying to climb from one income tier to the next in a brutal cycle, with petrol past 330 and a global economy bracing for hard years. Iman’s line is the one that stays: you don’t get out of this — you don’t better yourself — if you leave half the economy behind. The case for including women, in this conversation, was never sentimental. It was the cheapest growth available, and the one the country keeps declining to take.