Strong core banking systems can play a role in Fintech growth in Pakistan
Pakistan’s digital finance sector is expanding at
a pace faster than anticipated, with mobile banking accounts surpassing 120
million and app-based transactions becoming the dominant channel for digital
payments.
This milestone reflects a transition from early
adoption to widespread usage, highlighting growing public trust in digital
financial services. However, as transaction volumes climb sharply, experts warn
that sustaining this momentum will depend less on polished mobile apps and more
on the strength of underlying banking infrastructure.
Industry specialists note that core banking
platforms, integration layers, data pipelines, and operational discipline are
under increasing pressure to remain accurate, secure, and consistently
available. With Pakistan’s national payment ecosystem scaling rapidly, system
reliability has become critical.
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The Raast instant payment system alone has
processed over three billion transactions worth nearly Rs80 trillion since its
launch, with dozens of financial institutions now connected. As payment rails
expand, observers say banks’ internal system readiness will determine whether
growth results in seamless customer experiences or recurring service
disruptions.
Syed Mohammad Faisal, a Riyadh-based fintech
and digital transformation expert with nearly two decades of experience
managing high-volume banking systems, believes the next phase of fintech growth
will be shaped by resilience rather than surface-level innovation.
“Digital trust is built in the back-end, not
the front-end,” he said. “If core systems are slow, inconsistent, or frequently
unavailable, even the best-designed app cannot protect customer confidence.”
Faisal describes resilience as a multi-layered
discipline, emphasizing three critical areas: system capacity under peak loads,
real-time data accuracy to avoid balance mismatches or delays, and effective
continuity planning that enables rapid and clean disaster recovery.
He also highlighted integration sprawl as a
major hidden risk. As banks add new digital channels, wallets, analytics tools,
and third-party services, the number of system hand-offs increases—each
introducing potential failure points.
“There’s a difference between building a
feature and building a service,” Faisal said. “A true service plans for
downtime, tests failover regularly, monitors continuously, and treats incidents
as learning opportunities.”
The impact of system failures extends beyond
technology teams. Noman Shabbir, a strategic communications advisor, noted that
customers perceive outages and transaction reversals as breaches of trust
rather than technical issues.
“Every high-profile failure quickly becomes a
reputational challenge for the entire sector,” he said, adding that reliability
is now essential to sustaining digital adoption.
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Experts stress that resilience must be treated
as a governance priority, not merely an IT responsibility. This includes strong
change management practices, clear incident-response frameworks, vendor
accountability, and enforceable service-level agreements for all critical
partners.
Faisal argues that resilience should be
tracked like a business KPI, supported by regular disaster recovery drills,
real-time replication, and continuous system observability.
As
Pakistan’s fintech drive accelerates and consumer expectations continue to
rise, analysts say the future of digital banking will be determined behind the
scenes—less by flashy app launches and more by the unseen engineering that
keeps millions of simultaneous transactions accurate, timely, and dependable.
Source: APP