ISLAMABAD, Jul 06 (APP):The Minister of State for Railways and Finance, Bilal Azhar Kayani, Monday, chaired a high-level meeting to review the first-year progress of its cashless economy initiative, highlighting strong growth in digital transactions, merchants and banking users. The review highlighted significant progress across the digital payments’ ecosystem, with Annual digital transactions rose from 6.9 billion to 11.3 billion, said press release issued by finance ministry, adding the active …
Cashless drive lifts digital merchants above 2 million
ISLAMABAD, Jul 06 (APP):The Minister of State for Railways and Finance, Bilal Azhar Kayani, Monday, chaired a high-level meeting to review the first-year progress of its cashless economy initiative, highlighting strong growth in digital transactions, merchants and banking users.
The review highlighted significant progress across the digital payments’ ecosystem, with Annual digital transactions rose from 6.9 billion to 11.3 billion, said press release issued by finance ministry, adding the active digital payment merchants increasing from 0.5 million to over 2 million, supported by the government’s Raast QR Code initiative, while digital banking users expanded to more than 135 million.
Launched in June 2025 under the direct supervision of the Prime Minister, the initiative is built on three core pillars: enhancing public convenience, promoting transparency, and accelerating the formal documentation of the economy through digital payments.
Three sub-committees operate under the main Cashless Pakistan Committee, to execute the Prime Minister directives under the program: Digital Payments – Innovation and Adoption led by Governor State Bank, Digital Public Infrastructure led Minister of IT & T, and Digitizing Government Payments led by Finance Secretary.
Kayani also noted encouraging progress in financial inclusion, which increased to 69 percent, while the gender gap continued to narrow through targeted interventions.
He further reviewed progress on public sector digitization, with 25 high-impact federal and provincial entities identified for complete digitization through Raast by December 2026. The minister noted the progress made on digitizing government to people (G2P) payments with approximately 75% digital payments acceptance at both centralized and self accounting entities.
The Minister of State emphasized the importance of sustaining the momentum to further accelerate Pakistan’s digital transformation.
He reiterated the government’s commitment to working closely with regulators, financial institutions, fintech companies, and the private sector to expand digital payments, strengthen financial inclusion, and support a transparent and documented economy.
To ensure absolute transparency and the prudent use of public funds, Kayani emphasized on validating the progress, streamlining reporting gaps, and eliminating data duplication. A third-party has been hired by the government of Pakistan
which has started the assessments to ensure transparency
