Empowering the Entrepreneurial Spirit of Pakistan
“It is only with united effort and faith in our destiny that we shall be able to translate the Pakistan of our dreams into reality.” Muhammad Ali Jinnah 🇵🇰
Financial inclusion has the ability to activate Pakistan’s deep-rooted entrepreneurial spirit. We envision a future where a book store in Rawalpindi can sell their literature to a customer from London, as easy as they can to a customer in Islamabad. In order to realize this dream, we have to bring down barriers and improve our infrastructure. A big part of this and something we care deeply about is enabling online payments. Providing frictionless channels for our entrepreneurial and freelance communities to accept online forms of payment (domestic and international) is central to advancing Pakistan’s economic prospects. This needs to be achieved in a thoughtful and considered manner. One that embeds trust and security in our financial system.
Global and regional bodies have made concerted efforts to foster financial inclusion in Pakistan. For example, Pakistan is 1 of 25 countries prioritized in the World Bank Group’s Universal Financial Access 2020 initiative. At home, the SBP launched the 2025 National Financial Inclusion Strategy “a strategy for building a dynamic and inclusive financial sector to support Pakistan’s growth in the 21st century”. Yet despite these estimable efforts, Pakistan has one of the lowest financial inclusion rates in the world. Economically, we are falling behind our neighbors and other developing economies “Pakistan has lost market share to countries such as Laos, Vietnam, and Bangladesh. And once you lose market share…it’s very hard to regain it,” Asad Sayeed, an economist at Gothenburg. This is despite being the 5th largest country in the world and possessing an incredible amount of talent and resources. We are at a juncture in Pakistan, we can sit around and wait for international organizations to help (PayPal recently declined to enter the country) or we can take matters into our own hands.
We felt it important for Pakistan to take matters into its own hands versus waiting for international companies, so we built Safepay for Pakistan by Pakistanis. Safepay is a payment escrow system, that digitally facilitates the transaction between the buyer and seller, allowing entrepreneurs and freelancers to accept online payments and consumers to pay online securely. This decreases the risks of online payments and increases the accessibility of entrepreneurs’ products to domestic and international buyers. Merchants can get set up with Safepay in minutes, and we’ll be there with you throughout the experience.
Our priority is security and efficiency thus we’ve incorporated risk management measures, including, AES-256 GCM encryption and PCI compliance. We want Pakistan to economically succeed, and not fall behind our neighbors and other developing economies. We hope Safepay can move the needle on this agenda. We’re a young company and can set our roadmap directly based on what we hear from our users. To learn more about Safepay you can subscribe to our mailing list by signing up for Safepay or reach out to us directly via email (help@getsafepay.com).
