KARACHI: Visa has brought together senior personalities from Pakistan’s banking, fintech and digital assets sectors to explore how stablecoins could modernise the country’s payments infrastructure, particularly for remittances and cross-border commerce.
The roundtable, held in Karachi, centred on how a regulated, dollar-linked stablecoin could reduce friction in Pakistan’s multibillion-dollar remittance flows, accelerate business-to-business settlement cycles, and integrate merchants into more transparent payment rails.
Participants reached broad agreement on the need for clear policy frameworks, consumer protections and pilot programmes before any large-scale adoption.
Umar Khan, Visa’s country manager for Pakistan and Afghanistan, said the opportunity for Pakistan lay in modernising how money moves, but stressed that any adoption must strengthen financial integrity rather than circumvent it.
Visa said it has processed more than $3.5 billion in annualised stablecoin settlement volume globally and became one of the first major payments networks to settle transactions in stablecoin in 2023.
The discussions come amid active policy deliberations in Pakistan around digital asset governance. Participants acknowledged that sustained collaboration between industry and regulators would be essential to realising the technology’s potential while safeguarding financial stability.
