There is a familiar pattern in how Pakistan approaches policy problems. A statistic or dataset gets cited in one report, migrates into the next, gets quoted on a conference panel or media outlet, and eventually ends up in an AI-generated summary. By that point, it is outdated, decontextualised, and probably doing more harm than good. The conversation around financial inclusion has suffered precisely this fate.
For decades, Pakistan was treated as a genuine outlier in the region — a particularly large country that had done an awful job at bringing its population into the formal financial system. That characterisation was fair once, but less so now. Continuing to lead with it means we are diagnosing a patient who has largely recovered from one illness while missing the one they actually have.
Let’s start with the sheer scale of what has happened. Between FY17 and FY25, total financial accounts for individuals in Pakistan went from roughly 60 million to 244m, a fourfold increase. As of December, that figure jumped to almost 262m.
To state the obvious, the engine behind this shift was digitalisation. Branchless banking and electronic money institution wallets drove almost two-thirds of new account openings during this period. As of December, around half of them were registered on mobile phones, numbering over 126m across different licensing types. By any standard, it is one of the more dramatic expansions of financial access and yet remains largely absent from the general narrative.
Total accounts are a poor way to truly measure inclusion; a better approach is to look at relative numbers
The problem is that total accounts are a poor way to truly measure inclusion. A sizable share of Pakistan’s population holds accounts across multiple institutions, typically some combination of a legacy bank plus a wallet or two. The headline figure can therefore double, triple, or quadruple count the same individuals. I, myself, stand in there with a tally of seven, assuming the dormant ones have been struck off the data.
The cleaner measure is unique depositors, ie how many distinct people own an account in the formal system. That figure, drawn from data across banks, microfinance banks, development finance institutions, and electronic money institutions, stood at 99.2m as of June, before rising further to 103m by December. It is still a large number, translating into around two-thirds of adult Pakistanis. Now narrow the lens to active depositors — those who have engaged with their account in some way over the past 12 months, including something as minimal as an app login — and the number falls again to 80m, or 77.7 per cent of unique account holders, by December 2025.
There is, however, a visible divergence in growth at each layer of the funnel. While unique depositors grew by 83pc between FY17 and FY25, total accounts surged 250pc. This gulf suggests a financial deepening at play: the existing banked population is accumulating more accounts at a faster pace than new people are entering the system. As of December 2025, the average banked Pakistani holds 2.6 accounts.
Historically, Pakistan has also fared terribly on gender parity, boasting one of the highest gaps in financial services. At the broadest level, the underrepresentation persists: fewer than 40m women have at least one account, compared to 63.2m men. Of the former, only 29.7m are considered active.
Between FY17 and FY25, total financial accounts for Pakistanis went from roughly 60m to 244m, however, a sizable share of the population holds accounts across multiple institutions
But the better approach is to look at relative numbers, not absolute. We can do that through a parity ratio — the relevant indicator for women divided by that of men. By total accounts, this translates into 46pc, meaning there are 46 female accounts for every 100 male ones. While the gulf remains wide, things have improved over the last four years, with the parity ratio rising by 6.7 percentage points.
More importantly, by unique depositors, parity sits at 62.7pc as of December 2025, up 8.9 percentage points from the end of 2022. Women also tend to have a better active-to-total holdings ratio compared to men, implying that entry rather than usage is the biggest bottleneck for female financial inclusion.
That said, accounts — whether total, unique, or active — still only go so far. They quantify access, but don’t tell us about underlying activity across borrowing, investing, or even payments. By and large, Pakistanis hold non-remunerative products, meaning their relationship with financial institutions is limited to deposits and withdrawals. Fund transfers have improved usage substantially, but other products are still a rarity that only a tiny minority of the banked population accesses, especially among traditional scheduled institutions.
Unfortunately, the downstream indicators on usage remain weak, and the data to track them at any meaningful level of granularity largely does not exist. Now that the problem of access has been substantially addressed, this is where the focus must shift — and to do so, the right numbers must be looked at. That requires detailed regional data, sector-level transactions etc. Most importantly, it warrants a willingness to reframe what financial inclusion actually means in 2026.
The writer is the co-founder of Data Darbar and Head of InsightLab at KSBL.
Published in Dawn, The Business and Finance Weekly, April 13th, 2026