Raast Now Reaches 2.6 Million Pakistani Merchants, and Being Payable Is Not the Same as Being Found

The State Bank of Pakistan's payment systems review for the quarter to March 2026 records 3.7 billion retail transactions worth Rs168.8 trillion, up 9% on the previous quarter. Digital channels carried 3.4 billion of those, which is 92% of all retail payments by volume.

Underneath the headline, the number that matters most to a small business is a different one. Raast, the national instant payment system, processed 742 million transactions worth Rs23.27 trillion in the quarter, and has now onboarded more than 2.6 million merchants. Registered mobile app users passed 132 million, up 37% from 96 million a year earlier.

Read together, those figures describe a country where the payment problem has largely been solved. A Pakistani business can now take money from a customer instantly, digitally, at almost no cost, without a card terminal and without a bank branch. That was not true five years ago and it is a genuine achievement.

It also relocates the bottleneck. When 92% of retail payments are already digital and 2.6 million merchants can accept them, the ability to take payment stops being a competitive advantage. It becomes table stakes. What separates one business from another is whether the customer found them in the first place.

What do the State Bank figures actually show?

They show volume growth alongside near-total digital penetration of retail payments. Retail transactions reached 3.7 billion in the January to March 2026 quarter, worth Rs168.8 trillion, a 9% quarterly increase from 3.38 billion. Digital channels accounted for 3.4 billion of those transactions, or 92% by volume, with value rising to Rs68.3 trillion from Rs64.4 trillion.

The growth is real but it is growth in a market that is already mostly converted. Moving from 3.11 billion digital transactions to 3.41 billion is meaningful, and it is not the shape of an early-stage rollout. It is the shape of an established rail getting busier.

Raast is the clearest example. Person-to-person transfers alone reached 664 million transactions worth Rs18.88 trillion, up from 603 million worth Rs15.69 trillion. Pakistanis are not being persuaded to use digital payments. They already do.

Why does 2.6 million merchants change the competitive picture?

Because acceptance is no longer scarce. When only a minority of businesses could take digital payment, offering it was a reason to choose one shop over another. With 2.6 million merchants onboarded to Raast alone, a customer can assume payment will work almost anywhere, so the decision moves upstream to which business they think of first.

This is the standard pattern whenever infrastructure becomes universal. The advantage does not disappear, it migrates. It migrated from having a telephone, to being in the directory, to having a website, to being findable in search. Each time the capability spread widely enough, the differentiator moved one step earlier in the customer's journey.

Pakistan has reached that point with payments. The infrastructure question is closed for most businesses. The open question is discovery, and discovery is not something the State Bank can build a rail for.

So where is the remaining bottleneck?

Discovery and trust. A customer who can pay any of two and a half million merchants instantly still has to decide which one to buy from, and they make that decision before payment is ever mentioned. The constraint has shifted from whether a business can transact to whether anyone knows it exists and believes it will deliver.

This is uncomfortable for a lot of Pakistani small businesses, because the payment upgrade was largely done for them. Raast, the banks and the wallet providers built the rails. Adoption required signing up rather than strategy.

Discovery does not work like that. Nobody is going to onboard a business into being well known. There is no national programme that makes a company the obvious choice in its category. That work is specific to each business, it takes time, and it is why so many firms with excellent payment setups still complain that nothing is coming in.

The practical framing we use with clients through a digital marketing agency in Pakistan engagement is simple. Payment capability is a floor. Everything commercial happens above it.

What does a business do about it in practice?

Start where the customer starts. Before anyone pays, they search, ask, scroll or get recommended. Being present and credible at that point is the entire task, and for most small businesses it means three things: being findable by name and by category, having somewhere legitimate to send people, and showing evidence that other customers were satisfied.

The order matters. A business that buys advertising before it has a credible destination is paying to send people somewhere that will lose them. A business with a good website that nobody can find has built something nobody visits. The sequence that works is destination first, then discovery, then amplification.

Evidence is the part most often skipped and the part that does most of the work in a market where buyers are cautious about who they transact with. Reviews, real photographs, named clients, visible pricing where possible, and a clear account of what happens after payment. In a country where 132 million people hold registered mobile app accounts, the customer is not worried about whether they can pay. They are worried about whether they should.

Much of that is a matter of how a business presents itself online, which is why this work usually begins with website design and development rather than with campaigns.

Does this apply to businesses that do not sell online?

Yes, and often more so. The State Bank figures cover retail payments across the economy, not e-commerce alone. A workshop, clinic, restaurant or trades business that takes payment through Raast is part of this shift, and its customers research it the same way they research anything else, usually on a phone and usually before making contact.

The assumption that digital visibility only matters to online sellers is one of the most expensive mistakes a local business can make. Someone deciding between two service providers in the same city will look both up. If one has a coherent presence and the other has nothing, the comparison is over before any conversation happens.

The same logic drives the approach set out in the guide to digital marketing for accounting firms, where almost none of the buying happens online but almost all of the shortlisting does. Pakistani service businesses are in exactly that position now.

What does being findable actually mean here?

It means appearing at the three points where Pakistani buyers make decisions: search, maps and social. Most small businesses cover one of those by accident and none of them deliberately. A business with an active Instagram presence, no search visibility and an unclaimed maps listing is findable only by people who already know its name, which is the group that needed no help.

Search matters because it captures people describing a problem rather than a brand. Someone typing a category and a city has not decided who to buy from, which is precisely the moment worth being present for. Maps matters because a large share of local intent resolves there, and an inaccurate or missing listing removes a business from consideration silently. Social matters because it is where credibility is assessed once a name is known.

The three work as a sequence rather than as alternatives. Search and maps create the first encounter. Social and the website decide whether it goes anywhere. Businesses that pick one channel and defend it usually plateau, not because the channel is wrong but because they are absent at one of the other two stages.

There is also a compounding argument that is easy to underrate. A review collected this month still counts in three years. A page answering a common question keeps answering it. Advertising stops the day it is switched off. In an economy where costs are volatile and budgets get cut without much warning, the assets that survive a bad quarter are worth disproportionately more than the ones that do not, and almost every business discovers this in the wrong order.

What should a small business avoid concluding from these numbers?

That digital payment adoption alone will bring customers. It will not. The 92% figure describes how existing customers pay, not how new ones arrive. A business that reads growth in national transaction volumes as evidence that demand is coming its way will keep waiting.

It is also worth resisting the idea that this requires large spending. The businesses that do well here are rarely the ones spending the most. They are the ones that were consistent, published something useful, collected reviews as a matter of routine, and kept their information accurate over several years while competitors started and stopped.

Where this leaves you

Pakistan has built payment infrastructure that most comparable economies would be pleased with. 3.7 billion transactions a quarter, 92% of retail payments digital, 2.6 million merchants on Raast and 132 million registered app users describe a genuinely modernised system.

None of that answers the question a business owner actually has, which is why the phone is not ringing. The rails are shared. Everyone has them. What is not shared is whether a customer thinks of a particular business first, and that is built rather than issued.

We work with Pakistani businesses on that specific problem, and it is the main reason our client retention sits above 90%. The payment side is finished. The interesting work starts one step earlier, at the point where somebody decides who to buy from.

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