KARACHI: JazzCash is a key partner in the government’s push to document Pakistan’s informal economy, onboarding 1.7 million merchants onto SBP Raast interoperable QR network, and aims to reach two million digital merchants by the end of this year, according to Aamir Aftab, chief product officer at JazzCash.
“The network has grown from around 900,000 merchants in January to 1.7 million by July, nearly doubling in six months, and now moves close to Rs150 billion a month on average in QR payments,” JazzCash said in the statement.
“Getting someone to accept a digital payment is the easy part,” Aftab said. “What matters more is the record it creates. Most of these merchants have never had a documented history of their own business before. That’s often the first step towards things like formal credit.”
Fewer than 200,000 card terminals exist nationwide, concentrated among larger, organised retailers. JazzCash’s QR network, now eight times that size, lets kiryana stores, beauty salons and home-based cooks start accepting digital payments without ever needing a terminal.
Cash carries a cost that rarely shows up in the conversation. The SBP’s financial statements put the cost of printing currency at Rs31.3 billion, up from Rs13 billion in 2020, on top of the tax revenue lost to business activity that goes undocumented.
Merchants scan onto the network through the JazzCash Business App, submitting identity and biometric checks digitally, with field staff assisting merchants who need more handholding to trust the process. Aftab said that combination, self-service for merchants comfortable going digital alone and in-person support for those who aren’t, has been central to the pace of onboarding.
The harder problem now, Aftab said, is sustaining onboarding outside the big cities, where the cost of signing up each merchant runs higher and digital confidence is lower.
The push sits inside the Prime Minister’s Cashless Economy Initiative, backed by the State Bank of Pakistan through its Raast payment network, which JazzCash’s QR acceptance runs on. JazzCash Chairman Aamir Ibrahim sits on the Prime Minister’s Task Force on Digital Payments and the Cashless Economy.
JazzCash is also working with the Ministry of Finance to let users invest directly in government treasury bills through the app, Aftab said, part of a wider plan to build savings, credit and now investment products on top of the same wallet base established for payments. Pakistan has more than five million micro, small and medium enterprises, but fewer than a quarter have any digital footprint at all. Aftab said JazzCash Bazar, a marketplace still under development with Huawei, aims to bridge that gap by letting merchants open a digital storefront without needing a website of their own.
“The end goal isn’t just payments,” Aftab said. “It’s giving millions of small businesses a financial record for the first time, one that can eventually get them access to credit, insurance, investment opportunities.”
