KARACHI: The State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) on Friday said users of the Raast person-to-person (P2P) payment system made 7.9 million transactions worth Rs102.1 billion during the last fiscal year.
In continuation of its efforts to promote and enhance the digital payment system in the country, the SBP in February 2022, launched Raast P2P, which enabled payments among individuals, businesses, and other entities to settle transactions in real-time. The number of users of this instant payments platform stood at 15 million during FY2022.
The overall e-banking transactions rose 59.4 percent to Rs137.9 trillion in FY2022, according to the annual payment systems report for the fiscal year 2021-22.
The E-banking channel was mainly utilised for online funds transfer, the report said.
The SBP issued licenses to four new Electronic Money Institutions (EMIs) during the fiscal year. These EMIs issued 514,961 payment cards to their 262,558 account holders, onboarded 4,941 merchants, and issued Rs5.0 million emoney during FY22.
“In the coming years, SBP plans to further enhance and promote digital payment system, not just for household consumers, but for private and government sector as well, along with giving more emphasis on supply chain digitisation,” it said.
The number of mobile phones and internet banking users reached 8.4 million and 12.3 million respectively during FY22. In terms of transactions, mobile phone banking increased by 100.4 percent to 387.5 million, while internet banking grew by 51.7 percent to 141.7 million during the year.
By value, mobile phone banking and internet banking growth was 141.1 percent and 81.1 percent, thus, reaching Rs11.9 trillion and Rs10.2 trillion respectively. E-commerce transactions also witnessed similar trends as the volume grew by 107.4 percent to 45.5 million and the value by 74.9 percent to Rs106.0 billion.
During FY2022, a total of 32,958 point of sale (POS) machines were deployed in the country which led to an expansion of its network by 45.8 percent to 104,865. E-commerce merchants registered with the banks increased to 4,887 from 3,003 merchants during this period, the report said.
ATMs network in the country also grew by 4.8 percent during the year reaching 17,133 ATMs. The total number of transactions through POS were 137.5 million, 54.5 percent higher than the previous fiscal year with transaction value reaching Rs0.7 trillion growing by 56.1 percent.
A total of 692.3 million transactions were carried out through ATMs which amounted to Rs9.6 trillion, 19.2 percent higher than in FY21. There were 42.4 million payment cards in circulation in FY22 including 71.1 percent or 30.16 million debit cards; 24.3 percent or 10.3 million social welfare cards; 4.2 percent or 1.79 million credit cards and the rest were pre-paid and ATM-only cards.
A number of large-value transactions through the Real-Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) system of Pakistan reached 4.37 million by FY22 amounting to Rs681.6 trillion with an annual growth of 53.3 percent in value. During FY2022, paper-based transactions declined by 1.0 percent in volume though its value grew to Rs190.4 trillion, almost 25.6 percent higher than last year.