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ISLAMABAD, Jan 17 (APP):Pakistan’s digital finance sector is expanding faster than expected, with mobile banking accounts crossing the 120 million mark and app-based transactions emerging as the leading mode of digital payments.
The milestone marks a clear shift from early adoption to mainstream use, underscoring growing public confidence in digital financial services.
Yet as transaction volumes surge, experts caution that the real test of Pakistan’s fintech momentum lies beyond user-friendly apps and sleek interfaces. The strain, they say, is increasingly borne by core banking platforms, integration layers, data pipelines, and the operational discipline required to keep systems accurate, secure, and continuously available.
The stakes are rising across the entire ecosystem. Pakistan’s national payment infrastructure is expanding rapidly, amplifying the need for reliability. The Raast instant payment system has processed more than three billion transactions worth nearly Rs80 trillion since its launch, with dozens of financial institutions now integrated.
As payment rails scale, industry observers note that the readiness of banks’ internal core systems will determine whether growth translates into seamless service or recurring consumer frustration.
Syed Mohammad Faisal, a fintech and digital transformation expert based in Riyadh with nearly two decades of experience managing high-volume core systems and data integration, believes the next phase of Pakistan’s fintech growth will be decided by resilience engineering rather than cosmetic upgrades. “Digital trust is built in the back-end, not the front-end,” he said. “If the core is slow, inconsistent, or frequently down, the best app in the world can’t protect customer confidence.”
Faisal describes resilience as a layered discipline rather than a single solution. He points to three critical checks for banks and regulated platforms: system capacity and performance during peak loads; real-time data freshness to prevent mismatched balances or delayed updates; and continuity planning that allows clean and rapid switchover to disaster recovery systems without prolonged instability.
One of the most common hidden risks, he argues, is integration sprawl.
As banks add digital channels, wallets, scoring engines, and third-party services, the number of system hand-offs multiplies, each one a potential failure point. “There’s a difference between building a feature and building a service,”
Faisal noted. “A service means you plan for downtime, drill failover, monitor everything, and treat incidents as lessons, not surprises.”
The implications extend beyond technology teams. Noman Shabbir, a strategic communications advisor, said system outages and transaction reversals are experienced by customers as breaches of trust rather than technical glitches.
“Every high-visibility failure quickly becomes a reputational issue for the sector,” he said, adding that reliability is now central to sustaining confidence and preventing digital adoption from stalling.
Industry experts stress that resilience must be treated as a governance priority, not merely an IT concern. This includes robust change management, clear incident-response protocols, vendor accountability, and enforceable service-level agreements for all critical dependencies.
Faisal argues that resilience should be measured like a business KPI, backed by regular disaster recovery drills, real-time replication readiness, and continuous system observability.
As Pakistan’s fintech push accelerates and consumer expectations rise, analysts say the next chapter of digital banking will be written quietly, behind the screens. It will depend less on flashy app launches and more on the unseen engineering that ensures every transaction remains accurate, timely, and dependable, even when millions of users are moving money at the same time.