KARACHI: Serial entrepreneur and Pakistan Fintech Network Chairman Nadeem Hussain has urged the government to disincentivise cash transactions for the promotion of digitisation.

Speaking at the Pakistan Leadership Conversation 2022 held by the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants on Tuesday, the founding CEO of Tameer Microfinance Bank said the acceptance for digital payments at the local kiryana store is still low.

“The world has moved to SoftPoS but we’re still sceptical,” he said while referring to the software point-of-sale (PoS) that allows merchants to accept card payments directly on their phone.

The country had a little more than 79,000 PoS machines at the end of September 2021. The share of PoS transactions in the total value transacted in July-September 2021 was merely 0.06 per cent, according to the latest data provided by the State Bank of Pakistan.

He took a dig at big banks for paying lip service to digitisation but limiting their efforts to improving the front end alone.

“Creating a sexy app, with maybe a half-decent UI/UX [user interface/user experience] isn’t digitisation. If you are still gonna take a month and a half to approve a credit card or a personal loan, if you’re gonna take a month to open a basic account for an SME, then that’s not a track you want to follow for digitisation,” he said.

Mr Hussain called out tech entrepreneurs for focusing exclusively on developing apps for the 50 million users of smartphones in Pakistan while ignoring the app market for 65m users of feature phones. He also criticised banks for designing savings accounts that are ill-suited to the savings habits of Pakistanis.

“People don’t save money in bank accounts. They use committees to save. What’re we doing to facilitate committees? The second biggest form of savings is gold and gold ornaments. What’re we doing to offer fractional gold savings products? Something that allows buying and selling gold for Rs100?” he said.

Mr Hussain took a shot at big family businesses for being “too busy building malls and power plants rather than putting even half a billion dollars in the digital world”. Giving the example of India’s Paytm, a pay-through-mobile Indian company worth $20 billion, Mr Hussain said its founder was daring enough to put in $1bn of his own money to launch the business.

“You have to put money on the table. You’ll lose money at first. But you can’t create unicorns by investing $10-20m,” he said.

Published in Dawn, March 24th, 2022