Easypaisa: How Pakistan Got Mobile Banking Before Most of the World

In 2009, the vast majority of Pakistanis had never held a bank account. Sending money from Karachi to a village in Punjab meant handing cash to a bus driver or visiting a Western Union agent. Within five years, Easypaisa had changed this for tens of millions of people. Pakistan did not develop mobile money because it was a wealthy country with a strong financial system. It developed it because it was not, and needed something better.

The Problem Easypaisa Solved

To understand Easypaisa, you need to understand what moving money in Pakistan looked like in 2008. The country had approximately 9,000 bank branches for a population of 165 million — a branch density of roughly one per 18,000 people. Many of those branches were in urban commercial areas. The average Pakistani living in a small city, town, or rural district was not practically within reach of formal banking services.

Moving money from one city to another meant one of four options. You could send cash physically with a traveller. You could use the informal hawala network — effective and widely used but entirely unregulated. You could use a bank transfer if both sender and receiver had accounts, which in 2008 very few Pakistanis did. Or you could use a money transfer service like Western Union, which was available only in urban areas and charged significant fees.

The domestic remittance problem was particularly acute for Pakistan’s large internal migration population. An estimated 40–50 percent of Pakistan’s urban population in 2008 had migrated from other provinces or regions. They sent money home regularly — supporting parents, paying for children’s education, contributing to household expenses. The infrastructure for this was inadequate, expensive, and in some cases dangerous.

The Telenor-Tameer Partnership and the Easypaisa Model

Easypaisa was launched in October 2009 as a joint venture between Telenor Pakistan and Tameer Microfinance Bank. The partnership structure was deliberate and regulatory. Pakistani mobile money regulations at the time required banking institution involvement — a telecom company could not operate a financial service independently. Tameer, which had existing microfinance operations and regulatory relationships with the State Bank of Pakistan, provided the banking license framework. Telenor provided the distribution network and subscriber base.

The initial product was deliberately simple. Easypaisa’s first service was the Over-The-Counter (OTC) money transfer — a customer walks into an Easypaisa agent (a shopkeeper, a mobile phone retailer, a general store), hands over cash, provides the recipient’s mobile number, and the recipient receives an SMS notification. The recipient walks to the nearest Easypaisa agent and collects the cash. No account required. No bank card required. Just a mobile phone number.

The agent network was the critical piece. Easypaisa enrolled existing small shopkeepers — mobile top-up retailers, small general stores, petrol station kiosks — as Easypaisa agents with minimal training and small cash float requirements. The agent received a commission on each transaction. Overnight, Pakistan’s existing retail infrastructure became a quasi-banking network. By 2010, Easypaisa had over 15,000 agents. By 2012, over 50,000. By 2026, the figure is over 500,000.

What Easypaisa Could Do: A Services Map

BISP and Government Programmes: The Social Impact Inflection

If a single event accelerated Easypaisa beyond its organic growth rate, it was the partnership with the Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP), Pakistan’s flagship social protection programme. BISP provides quarterly cash grants to low-income households — primarily female heads of household — across Pakistan.

Before Easypaisa, BISP beneficiaries received payments through a physically distributed voucher system that required travel to collection points, created opportunities for intermediary fraud, and often did not reach rural beneficiaries at all. Easypaisa’s agent network — which by 2011 reached towns and districts that had no bank branches — offered an alternative. Beneficiaries were issued Easypaisa accounts. Payments were disbursed directly to those accounts. Beneficiaries collected from the nearest agent.

The BISP programme brought millions of Pakistani women into the Easypaisa ecosystem — women who had never previously interacted with a formal financial product of any kind. For many, the BISP payment received through Easypaisa was their first experience of digital financial services. The financial inclusion impact of BISP-Easypaisa exceeded what either programme’s designers had anticipated.

Timeline: Easypaisa 2009–2026

Easypaisa vs. JazzCash: The Mobile Money Duopoly

JazzCash, launched by Mobilink in 2012, grew more slowly than Easypaisa in the early years but eventually reached comparable scale. The two products now operate as a duopoly in Pakistani mobile money, with combined active wallets exceeding 100 million — more than the entire adult population of many countries.

The competition between them has been largely productive for consumers. Each price reduction by one prompted a matching response from the other. Each new service feature — QR payments, Raast integration, savings products — was matched within months. Neither achieved the network effects that M-Pesa reached in Kenya, where one service became so dominant that competition was effectively foreclosed. Pakistan’s duopoly is more balanced.

Easypaisa and JazzCash together have done more for Pakistan’s financial inclusion than all conventional banking expansion in the previous decade combined. This is not a criticism of the banks; it is a reflection of what mobile distribution can achieve that branch distribution cannot.
— Assessment widely cited in State Bank of Pakistan financial inclusion reports, 2019–2022.

What Easypaisa Means for the Next Decade

The neobanks that launched in Pakistan from 2020 onward — SadaPay, NayaPay — are building on foundations that Easypaisa and JazzCash created. A Pakistani population that had never interacted with digital financial services in 2009 now has tens of millions who are comfortable with mobile wallets, digital transfers, and QR payments.

The regulatory framework has also matured alongside Easypaisa’s growth. The State Bank of Pakistan’s fintech and mobile money regulations, refined over fifteen years of Easypaisa and JazzCash operation, are among the more sophisticated in Asia. Pakistan’s Raast instant payment infrastructure, launched in 2021, is more recent than India’s UPI but architecturally comparable.

The question for the next decade is depth rather than breadth. Pakistan now has 50 million Easypaisa wallets and a similar number of JazzCash wallets. But many of these accounts are lightly used — accessed for BISP collection or an occasional bill payment, not as a primary financial relationship. Converting light users to active, multi-service digital financial service users is the next challenge. It is harder than the first challenge (reaching people who had no access at all), but it is also the challenge that produces sustainable financial services businesses rather than government-subsidised distribution infrastructure.

Easypaisa began by solving one specific problem: a factory worker in Karachi could not easily send money home to DG Khan. It solved that problem within two years of launching. The fact that it has grown into a 50-million-wallet financial platform serving everything from BISP disbursements to merchant QR payments reflects the elasticity of demand for basic financial services in a population that had been systematically underserved for decades. That demand existed before Easypaisa. Easypaisa simply built infrastructure that let it be expressed.