Reporting snapshot · 13 November 2026 (Asia/Karachi). The direction was given at a committee meeting on 12 November and published the same day; the working paper, any fee level and any timetable are not public. The merchant and payment-volume figures are the government's own and cover digital payments generally rather than Raast QR alone.
Pakistan’s Finance Division has directed the State Bank of Pakistan to prepare a working paper for the approval of a merchant discount rate scheme for Raast QR, the central bank’s instant-payment system, as part of the government’s push to widen digital payments. Radio Pakistan reported that Minister of State for Finance Bilal Azhar Kayani gave the direction while chairing a follow-up meeting of the Cashless Pakistan committee in Islamabad on Thursday, 12 November, to review progress on the prime minister’s cashless initiative.
A merchant discount rate is the fee a shop accepts for taking a digital payment, normally deducted from the value of each transaction. Raast QR is the scan-and-pay version of the State Bank’s Raast instant-payment system, and a rate scheme for it has to settle who carries that fee — the merchant, the bank that collects it, the customer, or some combination of the three — and at what level for which kinds of merchant. None of that is settled yet. The releases published after the meeting give no rate, no timetable and no allocation of costs.
What the committee was told about digital payments
The meeting was told that active merchants accepting digital payments have risen from half a million to 2.03 million, and that the overall volume of digital payments in the country has doubled in a year, Radio Pakistan reported. The News International added the reach of the rails behind those figures: Raast QR codes have been placed on more than 45 million gas and electricity bills, and every National Database and Registration Authority centre has been equipped to accept Raast QR payments.
Those are government numbers for digital payments as a whole, not a count of Raast QR merchants, and they do not say how much of the doubling came from QR codes rather than from card acceptance or bank apps. The direction nonetheless lands on a central bank that has already published the shape of the market it is being asked to price. The State Bank’s payment systems review for 2025-26, which KhabarWire reported in October, recorded 13.2 billion digital retail transactions, 92 per cent of the retail total, more than 11.1 billion of them through mobile channels, and a point-of-sale network of 337,791 terminals in 295,367 merchant locations.
The wider goal behind the pricing work is the same one the finance minister set out when he tied the cashless push to widening the tax base and bringing more of the economy into documented channels, KhabarWire reported in July.
The one dated change: Asaan Assignment Accounts move to Raast
From 16 November, all payments for Asaan Assignment Accounts across the country will be processed through Raast, with the drawing and disbursing officers already trained for the transition, Radio Pakistan said. That is the only timetable the meeting produced, and it is a change of plumbing rather than of pricing. The name links the accounts to the Asaan fixed-tax scheme for small traders that the government launched in June, which KhabarWire described, although neither account states which payments the switch covers or how much money it moves.
Kayani also asked the State Bank to assess whether broader economic indicators should be folded into the monitoring dashboard, including the ratio of payments processed through the Real Time Gross Settlement system to gross domestic product. The News International reported that request, along with a refinement of the dashboard itself: the revised indicators would track transaction volumes and values, as well as the number of unique account users, rather than volume alone. The Express Tribune’s account of the same Finance Division briefing records that the meeting reviewed decisions taken by the committee under the prime minister’s chairmanship, and that Kayani thanked participants and directed that coordination between public and private stakeholders be strengthened to meet the initiative’s targets.
The state news agency published a photograph of Kayani chairing the follow-up meeting at the Finance Division, with a focus on digital payments and on progress under the prime minister’s initiative, Associated Press of Pakistan reported. The meeting brought together the Finance Division, the State Bank, the Ministry of Information Technology and Telecommunication and the registration authority, alongside executives from Easypaisa Digital Bank, JazzCash, Bank Alfalah, JS Bank and Karandaaz Pakistan, The News International reported.
What happens before a scheme exists
A working paper is a step, not a decision. The releases do not say which State Bank forum would consider the paper, whether the bank would consult banks and merchant groups before doing so, what the rate would be, whether it would differ by merchant size or sector, or when any of it would take effect. Nor do they say whether a scheme approved for Raast QR would extend to payments in which the payer is the government rather than a customer, which is where the 16 November Asaan switch sits.
The next step Kayani named is a meeting in Karachi with the presidents and chief executives of banks to discuss the promotion of digital payments, The News International reported. That is the point at which the question of who pays for acceptance, and how it is divided, is most likely to be argued in public.
For now the published position is narrow. The Finance Division has told the central bank to write the paper; the central bank has not written it in public; and no merchant or customer has been told what a Raast QR payment will cost. KhabarWire is tracking the steps of the drive in its Cashless Pakistan hub.
