Raast is Pakistan’s national instant payment system, enabling end-to-end digital payments among individuals, businesses, and government entities in real time. It is Pakistan’s modern faster payments infrastructure, designed to support low-value retail payments with instant settlement, strong security, and broad interoperability across the ecosystem.
Raast provides low-cost, universal access for participants across the financial industry - including commercial banks, microfinance banks, government entities, and regulated fintechs (EMIs and PSPs) - to build scalable, always-on payment experiences for customers and merchants.
Pakistan has historically seen lower adoption of electronic payments due to factors such as low banking penetration, limited awareness and trust in digital payment methods, interoperability gaps, accessibility challenges, and transaction costs. While Pakistan’s Real-Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) system supports settlement for large-value and corporate payments, Raast is purpose-built to facilitate everyday retail payments with significantly greater speed, reach, and efficiency.
Raast is operated by Raast Payments Pakistan (Private) Limited (RPP), a wholly-owned subsidiary of the State Bank of Pakistan, responsible for the operational management, enablement, and ongoing evolution of the Raast scheme and its services in close coordination with ecosystem participants.
Raast aims to address some key industry challenges within the payment ecosystem:
Financial institutions and payment service providers have historically faced difficulty connecting to each other due to fragmented rails and the absence of a ubiquitous, interoperable national layer.
In many cases, fees on digital transfers and payments make electronic payments less accessible, especially for low-income segments, slowing adoption and keeping cash dominant.
Payment journeys can be complex and inconsistent across apps, and widely accepted, simple-to-use digital payment modes at merchants have not reached the scale needed to build everyday usage habits.
Existing payment types and infrastructure have not always provided uniform protections around data security, authentication, and fraud risk management, which undermines trust and usage.
