Building a Payments Company for Pakistan’s SME Economy

Partner track record — Ali Saqib Janjua, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, PayPro (Private) Limited, September 2019 to July 2023

1. Context

Pakistan’s payments problem has never been consumer wallets. It has been the business-to-business layer underneath them. Most small and medium enterprises invoiced informally, collected in cash, and reconciled by hand. That left them invisible to the formal financial system: no transaction record, therefore no credit history, therefore no access to working capital.

Consumer-facing wallets had grown quickly by this point. The commercial gap was on the collection side, where a business needs to raise an invoice, offer a customer every payment rail that customer actually uses, and have the settlement reconcile automatically. Solving that is less glamorous than a consumer app and considerably harder, because it requires integration across banks, wallets and cash networks simultaneously.

PayPro was founded to close that gap, operating within the State Bank of Pakistan’s payments licensing regime and pursuing Electronic Money Institution authorisation.

2. Mandate

Founder and Chief Executive Officer. Responsible for the technology and business roadmap, the regulatory strategy, capital raising, partnerships, and building the organisation from inception.

3. What the work involved

Platform strategy. Building a payments and invoicing platform that combined card and bank payments with digital invoicing and an over-the-counter cash collection network. The cash leg mattered more than it might appear. In a market where a large share of end customers still pay in cash, a digital collection product that cannot accept cash simply does not get adopted by the merchant.

Open API framework. Designing and implementing an open API layer so that banks, fintechs and enterprise systems could integrate directly. This turned the platform from a product into infrastructure, and made each new banking partner additive rather than bespoke.

Bank and ecosystem partnerships. Building the partner network across banks, digital wallets and financial institutions that supplied the underlying rails, and aligning fintechs, banks and SMEs under a single platform strategy.

Regulatory engagement. Working with the State Bank of Pakistan and industry bodies through the evolution of the payments licensing regime, including the Electronic Money Institution pathway.

Development finance. Securing grant funding, including support from USAID, directed at digitising micro, small and medium enterprises beginning the shift to digital payments.

4. Outcome

By the end of the founder’s tenure the platform had:

  • digitally enabled more than 2,600 SMEs
  • enabled more than PKR 80 billion in digital payments since inception
  • established an open API framework in production with banking and fintech partners
  • built a multi-rail collection network spanning bank transfer, card, ATM and cash over the counter

The more durable outcome is structural. Every invoice raised and settled on the platform creates a transaction record for a business that previously had none. That record is the raw material for working capital lending. Building the payments layer first, and lending on top of the resulting data, is a materially lower risk sequence than launching SME credit against no data at all.

5. What this means for a client

Distribution is the constraint, not the product. SME payments products fail on merchant acquisition and on the absence of the payment method the end customer actually wants to use, not on feature depth. Any business case that assumes digital-only collection in a cash-heavy market is overstating adoption.

Build the rails as infrastructure, not as a product. An open API layer converts every integration into reusable capability. Without it, each bank partnership is a bespoke project and the cost of growth rises with scale instead of falling.

Payments data is the real asset. The transaction history is worth more over time than the transaction fee. Institutions that treat payments purely as a fee line miss the lending and risk franchise that the data makes possible.

Licensing sequence shapes the business model. In Pakistan’s regime the choice between payment service provider, payment system operator and electronic money institution authorisation determines what the business may hold, what it may settle, and therefore what it can charge for. That decision belongs at the start of the strategy, not at the end.

6. Relevant capability

Payments strategy and licensing, merchant acquiring and collections, open banking and API architecture, SME and embedded finance, bank and fintech partnership structuring, and development finance engagement.

This case study describes a partner’s executive experience prior to joining Leap Associates. Metrics are those of the partner’s own record for the period to July 2023 and are not current company figures. PayPro was not a client of Leap Associates.