Pakistan’s RAAST, the State Bank of Pakistan’s real-time instant payment infrastructure stands at a pivotal inflection point, where its technical readiness to scale into a national payments backbone is now being tested by a more complex and less visible variable: trust. This report, produced by the Better Than Cash Alliance under the United Nations Development Programme’s Prosperity Pakistan framework, and authored by Raza Matin with project leadership from Abhishek Srivastava and research support from KPMG and contributing advisors, examines that tension in detail. Drawing on global evidence and cross-market experience, it argues that the long-term success of RAAST will depend not on speed or reach alone, but on whether users; merchants, consumers, and financial institutions believe the system is secure, fair, and capable of responding effectively when things go wrong, particularly in an environment where real-time settlement compresses the space for error, intervention, and recovery.
The 47-page document draws on case studies from Brazil, India, Jordan, Mexico, the UK, Singapore, Thailand, and Kenya. It examines fraud typologies, AI’s dual role as both shield and threat, Pakistan’s regulatory gaps, and a structured roadmap for closing them. The breadth of these cases matters because no country arrives at trust in digital payments through technical design alone. Every successful system has had to confront the same core challenge in different ways: how to persuade users that instant payments are not merely fast, but dependable, recoverable, and governed in a manner that protects ordinary people as strongly as it protects institutional efficiency. The report treats that challenge as the central strategic question before RAAST.
The Stakes: Why Trust Is the Variable That Determines Everything
The report opens with a foundational argument: in a real-time payment system, speed is both the feature and the vulnerability. Money moves in seconds. Fraudulent transactions, once settled, are structurally difficult to reverse. And in that narrow gap between authorization and irreversibility, trust either holds or fractures. This is what makes instant payments fundamentally different from slower legacy rails, where delay itself often acted as a weak but useful buffer against misuse. RAAST’s promise lies in removing friction, but removing friction also strips away time for second thoughts, manual interventions, and institutional pauses. In a system designed for immediacy, the safeguards have to be stronger, clearer, and far more visible.
The report frames fraud and weak recourse as “the single greatest threat” to Pakistan’s hard-won financial inclusion gains. When a user is defrauded and cannot get their money back, the damage extends well beyond the individual. Public confidence erodes, word of mouth turns negative, adoption stalls, and the demographic most likely to disengage; rural, lower-income, first-time digital users, retreats back to cash. These are precisely the populations that RAAST is designed to bring into the formal financial system. In other words, every unresolved fraud case is not just a consumer grievance; it is also a small but real blow to the larger national project of digitization. A system can continue to process transactions and still lose the social legitimacy that makes those transactions meaningful at scale.
The UN Principles for Responsible Digital Payments, endorsed by over 50 organizations globally, anchor the report’s normative framework. These principles demand transparency, privacy, non-discrimination, effective recourse, and proactive risk management, not as aspirational ideals but as minimum standards for any payment system that claims to serve the public good. The report’s deeper argument is that these principles are especially relevant in emerging markets such as Pakistan, where many users are still crossing the threshold from informal cash behavior into formal digital finance. For them, the first bad experience may also be the last. Trust, therefore, is not an abstract ethical concern hovering above the system. It is the hard operating variable that determines whether the system deepens inclusion or triggers retrenchment.
Conceptual Framework: Three Pillars of Trust
The report organizes its analysis around a three-pillar conceptual framework, drawn from global best practices in instant payment ecosystems. This framework is useful because it avoids the common mistake of treating fraud as merely a technical problem. Instead, it locates trust at the intersection of rules, tools, and institutions, suggesting that durable confidence in RAAST will emerge only when all three pillars reinforce one another consistently over time.
Pillar 1: Policy and Regulation
A clearly articulated liability regime, mandatory multi-factor authentication, and a centralized fraud intelligence platform form the regulatory foundation. Regulatory clarity, knowing who is responsible when fraud occurs, is a prerequisite for user confidence, not an afterthought. The report draws on Reserve Bank of India guidance and UK regulatory frameworks as evidence. This pillar matters because payment systems do not operate in a vacuum of technological neutrality; they are lived by people who need to know where they stand when something goes wrong. A system that processes payments instantly but leaves responsibility ambiguous creates the worst of both worlds: efficiency in execution and confusion in redress. The report repeatedly returns to the idea that liability clarity is itself a form of consumer protection, because it removes the burden from the user to navigate institutional fragmentation.
Pillar 2: Technology and Innovation
Biometric authentication, adaptive risk-based transaction scoring, and AI-driven fraud detection are the technological layer. However, AI is simultaneously the most powerful fraud prevention tool available and, if ungoverned, a source of new risks, including discriminatory false positives that exclude legitimate low-income users. The technological layer is therefore not simply about sophistication; it is about calibrated sophistication. A fraud detection model that flags the wrong people too often can itself become a driver of distrust, especially among populations already uncertain about digital systems. The report’s treatment of technology is careful in this regard. It does not romanticize innovation. It treats it as necessary, but only when embedded in governance structures that ensure fairness, transparency, and explainability.
Pillar 3: Stakeholder Collaboration
No single actor, not SBP, not individual banks, can build trust alone. Cross-institutional fraud data sharing, coordinated consumer education, merchant training programs, and public-private working groups are essential. Brazil’s DICT fraud directory, India’s CPFIR registry, and Singapore’s industry-led anti-scam collaborations demonstrate that collective action materially reduces fraud losses. This pillar is especially important in Pakistan, where institutional silos continue to constrain the speed and coherence of response. Fraud does not respect organizational boundaries. It moves across banks, telecom systems, digital wallets, and identity layers. A fragmented response guarantees delayed learning. A collaborative architecture, by contrast, allows institutions to recognize patterns early and respond in ways no single player could manage alone.
Global Case Studies: What Faster Payment Systems Have Learned
Brazil: Pix — Agility as a Regulatory Virtue
Launched by the Central Bank of Brazil in 2020, Pix reached over 140 million users within two years, one of the fastest adoption curves for any payment system globally. Success brought new threats: social engineering scams and “Pix kidnappings,” where criminals physically coerced victims into initiating transfers at gunpoint. Brazil’s case is important because it demonstrates that success itself can generate new categories of criminal attention. Scale, convenience, and ubiquity make a system attractive not only to users, but also to bad actors looking for quick extraction points.
Brazil’s response is the report’s template for regulatory agility. In 2023, the BCB enhanced its Infraction Notification System to flag suspicious Pix keys by fraud typology. In 2024, Resolution No. 403 capped unregistered devices at BRL 1,000 per day. Night-time transaction limits reportedly halved violent coercion incidents in São Paulo. Looking ahead, Brazil is launching MED 2.0, a fraud reversal mechanism enabling post-settlement fund recovery. What the report admires here is not perfection, but responsiveness. Brazil did not assume its initial architecture would be sufficient. It adapted, iterated, and used regulation as an instrument of real-time learning. That is a crucial lesson for Pakistan, where the temptation may be to regard infrastructure rollout as the end point rather than the beginning of an evolving security and trust agenda.
India: UPI — Consumer Protection as a Growth Strategy
India’s Unified Payments Interface processes over 15 billion transactions per month as of 2024. Its trust architecture rests on the RBI’s zero-liability policy for unauthorized transactions, mandatory two-factor authentication, and the centralized CPFIR fraud registry. The UPI-Help in-app dispute portal allows real-time complaint tracking. India’s example is particularly relevant because it shows that consumer protection can be growth-enhancing rather than restrictive. Rather than slowing the expansion of digital payments, visible recourse and liability clarity appear to have made the ecosystem more credible, and therefore more scalable.
India’s Finance Ministry recorded an 85% year-on-year jump in phishing-driven UPI fraud in FY2023-24, underscoring that even the world’s largest real-time payment network remains in an ongoing arms race with fraudsters. This is one of the report’s most useful correctives to techno-optimism. No matter how successful a payment system becomes, trust does not become self-sustaining. It must be renewed continuously as fraud patterns evolve. India’s scale is impressive, but the report’s emphasis is on how that scale has required corresponding expansion in institutional safeguards, complaint mechanisms, and fraud intelligence capacity.
Jordan: JoMoPay and CliQ — The Small Market Model
Jordan’s JoMoPay and CliQ demonstrate that high-trust payment ecosystems can be built even in smaller, emerging digital markets. Both systems enforce mandatory KYC, PIN-based authentication, and network-level fraud monitoring. Jordan’s distinctive contribution is law enforcement integration: the Cyber Crime Unit actively investigates e-wallet fraud, makes visible arrests, and reinforces public confidence that the system has teeth. This is a particularly striking point because trust is shaped not only by the design of the payment system, but by the visibility of consequences for those who abuse it.
For Pakistan, Jordan offers a useful reminder that a country does not need the scale of India or Brazil to build credible trust architecture. Smaller ecosystems can sometimes move faster precisely because coordination costs are lower. The report uses Jordan to show that law enforcement integration need not be symbolic. It can be made legible to the public in ways that strengthen deterrence and reassure users that the state does not regard digital fraud as an unavoidable cost of modernization.
Mexico: SPEI and CoDi — Infrastructure Alone Is Insufficient
Mexico’s SPEI system has strong encryption and end-to-end transaction traceability, but Mexico does not mandate automatic refunds for fraud victims, recourse is institution-dependent. CoDi, a QR-based merchant payments overlay, struggled with adoption partly because users lacked confidence in their recourse options. Mexico’s experience is the report’s cautionary tale: technical robustness without visible consumer protection creates trust gaps that slow adoption. This lesson matters deeply for RAAST because it separates infrastructural readiness from public willingness. A system can be secure in a technical sense and still fail socially if users do not believe they will be protected when something goes wrong.
The report implicitly warns against a common policy instinct in emerging digital systems: to equate strong rails with inevitable uptake. Mexico shows that this equation does not hold. Traceability, encryption, and interoperability matter, but they do not substitute for reassurance. For the ordinary user, the most important question is not whether the system is elegant in design. It is whether their money is safe, and whether they will be heard if they are harmed.
United Kingdom: FPS — Liability Clarity as Market Design
The UK’s Faster Payments Service faced a surge in Authorized Push Payment (APP) scams as fraudsters exploited transaction speed. The Contingent Reimbursement Model Code, followed by mandatory reimbursement legislation, made it compulsory for institutions to reimburse scam victims except in cases of gross negligence. The Confirmation of Payee name-checking service reduced APP scams by 17% within a year. The UK’s key lesson: mandating shared liability between sending and receiving banks creates ecosystem-wide incentives to detect and prevent scams early. This is a powerful insight because it turns liability from a post-fraud burden allocation mechanism into a market-shaping tool.
The report uses the UK case to argue that when institutions know they will bear part of the cost of fraud, their incentives change. Prevention becomes cheaper than reimbursement. Detection becomes a strategic priority rather than a compliance burden. For RAAST, this is highly relevant, because a shared-liability regime could push banks and payment service providers to improve fraud analytics, onboarding controls, and transaction monitoring without waiting for the regulator to prescribe every operational detail.
Singapore: PayNow — A “Scamdemic” in a Mature Market
Singapore’s PayNow represents perhaps the most sobering case study. Despite aggressive MAS regulatory action, Singaporeans lost S.1 billion to scams in 2023 alone, a 70% year-on-year increase, with over 51,000 cases reported in 2024. Victims are typically manipulated into authorizing transfers themselves, meaning no technical control could block the transaction. The key lesson for RAAST: even world-class technical defenses are insufficient without continuous consumer education and formal accountability frameworks. Singapore’s sophistication makes this lesson harder, not easier, because it removes the comforting illusion that only weak systems suffer large-scale fraud.
The report reads Singapore as evidence that scam ecosystems evolve with remarkable speed, often moving into the space between technical control and human judgment. Once users themselves are persuaded to authorize transfers, the problem becomes less about system compromise and more about persuasion, coercion, and deception. This makes education, interface design, and recourse just as important as backend defenses.
Thailand: PromptPay — Fraud at Regional Scale
Thailand’s PromptPay introduces a dimension that extends beyond any single domestic system: organized transnational fraud networks. Since the collapse of Southeast Asia’s gambling industry during COVID-19, criminal groups have repurposed facilities in Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos into “fraud factories.” In 2023, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime reported a 1,530% increase in deepfake-related scams across Asia-Pacific. The implication for RAAST: Pakistan’s fraud prevention architecture must account for coordinated transnational threats that no single central bank can address alone. This is where the report broadens the analytical frame beyond national regulation and domestic compliance.
The importance of Thailand’s example lies in its demonstration that real-time payments increasingly sit inside a broader geography of criminal innovation. Fraud is no longer only local, opportunistic, or small scale. It can be industrialized, outsourced, and regionally networked. For Pakistan, that means anti-fraud architecture cannot stop at consumer alerts and bank-level controls. It must eventually integrate cyber intelligence, law enforcement coordination, and perhaps international information-sharing frameworks.
Kenya: M-Pesa — Behavioral Design as Trust Infrastructure
Kenya’s M-Pesa is included for its design philosophy, which is directly transferable to RAAST. Hakikisha allows users to confirm a recipient’s name before completing a transaction, reducing mistaken transfers by over 60%, cutting daily reversal requests from 12,000 to 4,000 within months of launch. These are behavioral nudges, small interface decisions grounded in how real people use money, and they deliver outsized fraud reduction. Kenya’s case is valuable because it reminds policymakers that trust is often built in moments so small they can be overlooked: a confirmation screen, a name-check, an extra prompt that slows a risky action.
The report clearly values this approach because it bridges technology and human behavior. Good design does not simply make a payment system easier to use. It can make it harder to misuse, harder to exploit, and easier to navigate under stress. For Pakistan, where many users may have varying literacy levels, intermittent connectivity, or limited familiarity with app-based finance, this design layer could prove disproportionately important.
Fraud Typologies: The Human Problem in a Technical System
The report maps the fraud types that instant payment systems generate or amplify. In Pakistan, the dominant type, social engineering through impersonation of bank officials, government representatives, and prize scams is severely underreported. SBP has acknowledged that fraud reporting is skewed toward high-value cases, while small-ticket scams go largely unreported, calibrating policy responses to incomplete data. That underreporting matters because it means the visible fraud landscape may understate the everyday damage being done to trust, especially among lower-income users for whom even small losses can be devastating.
The key analytical conclusion: most real-time payment fraud exploits human weaknesses rather than technical vulnerabilities. Technical controls are necessary but insufficient, they must be paired with consumer education, behavioral design, and clear recourse pathways. This may be one of the report’s most important points, because it reframes fraud prevention from a purely engineering problem into a multidisciplinary challenge involving psychology, communications, interface design, dispute management, and public education. In practical terms, it means RAAST cannot secure itself only through code and compliance manuals. It will also need language, design, and institutional empathy.
Artificial Intelligence: Opportunity and Battleground
AI as a Fraud Prevention Tool
Leading instant payment systems have deployed AI-driven behavioral analysis and transaction scoring as core fraud defenses. Brazil’s Pix and India’s UPI use these systems to detect anomalies in real time, blocking or pausing suspicious transactions without disrupting legitimate flows. Singapore’s PayNow banks use AI to detect subtle behavioral deviations, unusual navigation patterns, geolocation inconsistencies, as early indicators of account compromise. AI also transforms dispute resolution: India’s UPI chatbots handle large complaint volumes efficiently, routing complex cases to human agents only when necessary. The report presents these examples to show that AI is increasingly becoming foundational infrastructure in modern payment trust systems, not merely an optional enhancement.
But the report is careful not to drift into solutionism. It treats AI as useful precisely because instant payments compress the time available for human review. In a world where transactions settle in seconds, risk scoring also needs to happen in seconds, and only machine-driven systems can operate at that tempo. Yet speed in detection is valuable only if it does not become arbitrary or exclusionary. That is where the report introduces its more cautionary analysis.
AI as a Risk Factor
Three AI risks receive particular treatment in the report:
- Adversarial manipulation: Fraudsters are using AI to generate deepfake identities, automate phishing attacks, and launch synthetic identity fraud at scale. Systems without robust model governance can be gamed by adversarial inputs. This matters because defensive AI and offensive AI are now developing in tandem, meaning the fraud landscape is no longer merely reactive. Attackers can innovate at machine speed too.
- Discriminatory false positives: Poorly trained models may flag legitimate low-income, rural, or first-time users at higher rates, directly threatening RAAST’s financial inclusion mission. This is a deeply important concern in Pakistan, where digital transaction histories may be thinner, identity signals more uneven, and user behavior more diverse than the datasets on which generic models are often built. A system that blocks legitimate users too often will teach them to distrust the system even if it is technically reducing fraud.
- Regulatory opacity: Without mandated transparency, institutions may deploy AI systems that are opaque, biased, or ineffective, compounding rather than reducing risk. This risk is perhaps the most institutionally significant, because opacity allows weak systems to masquerade as advanced systems. Without disclosure, auditability, and human review channels, AI can become both a shield and an excuse.
The proposed mitigation is an “AI Resilience Lab”, a partnership between SBP, academia, and industry for stress-testing payment models against emerging fraud tactics, modeled on similar initiatives in Singapore and the EU. The strength of this proposal lies in its recognition that governance capacity must evolve alongside technical capacity. Pakistan does not merely need AI adoption in payments; it needs domestic capability to test, challenge, and improve the models that increasingly shape payment risk decisions.
Pakistan’s Regulatory Landscape: Gaps and Opportunities
SBP has issued regulations governing branchless banking, Electronic Money Institution operations, and broader digital financial services, a meaningful foundation. But the report identifies four specific and consequential gaps. The report does not dismiss Pakistan’s progress. Rather, it argues that progress has been uneven, and that the next phase of RAAST’s development requires sharper institutional alignment if trust is to become durable rather than fragile.
- Ambiguous liability structures. Pakistan’s regulatory framework does not specify clear liability divisions among banks, PSPs, and consumers in cases of fraud. Without this clarity, users are caught between institutions during disputes, with no guaranteed outcome. In practice, this means the burden of institutional ambiguity is transferred downward onto the individual user, who is often least equipped to navigate it.
- Inconsistent dispute timelines. There is no national standard requiring banks and PSPs to resolve RAAST payment disputes within a specific timeframe. Dispute timelines vary significantly by institution, generating frustration and eroding trust. In a real-time system, long dispute cycles create a particularly painful contradiction: payment is instant, but justice is slow.
- Limited consumer education. SBP has supported general financial literacy but has not invested in targeted education focused on real-time payment risks. Many RAAST users currently do not know how to verify payment recipients, recognize phishing scams, or initiate fraud reports quickly. That gap becomes especially consequential when first-time users encounter fraud in their earliest interactions with the system.
- Absence of a centralized fraud monitoring system. Pakistan lacks a national fraud intelligence database where banks, PSPs, and law enforcement can share real-time alerts. Without centralized intelligence, RAAST participants operate in silos — reacting to fraud individually and detecting threats late. This is not only inefficient; it is structurally dangerous in an ecosystem where fraud patterns can scale across institutions very quickly.
Gender-Intentional Design: A Structural Priority
The report devotes substantial attention to gender, not as a supplementary concern but as a structural priority. A national survey in Côte d’Ivoire found that women were more likely than men to fall victim to digital payment scams (16% vs. 12%), and significantly more likely to struggle with navigating financial menus. A Cambodian case study found that visual-aid-based financial literacy interventions increased digital wallet usage among women factory workers far more effectively than app-based or text-heavy strategies. These international examples are used not as detached development anecdotes, but as evidence that interface assumptions and education models often reproduce gendered barriers unless they are designed consciously against them.
Consistent with UN Responsible Digital Payment Principle 3 (Prioritize Women), the report recommends:
Visual-first interfaces with simplified terms allowing low-literacy users to recognize scams and report issues quickly. This is not simply a usability matter. It is a trust issue, because a user who cannot confidently interpret the interface is more easily manipulated and less likely to seek redress.
Local-language, gender-aware complaint channels with extended operating hours aligned with caregiving responsibilities. This reflects a practical understanding that access is shaped by time, domestic roles, and linguistic familiarity, not merely by formal availability.
Mandatory gender-disaggregated fraud and recourse reporting so SBP can evaluate whether trust-building systems are working equitably. Without data broken down by gender, it becomes impossible to know whether the system is improving inclusion or quietly reinforcing exclusion.
Integration of fraud education into government transfer onboarding (BISP, NADRA wallets), the entry point for many Pakistani women. This is one of the most operationally useful suggestions in the report, because it embeds trust-building at the point where users are already entering the digital system.
Enforcement against gender-based discrimination in recourse, no user denied redress due to informal ID, perceived digital illiteracy, or low claim value. Here the report insists that fairness cannot remain rhetorical. It has to be codified in how disputes are handled and resolved.
Policy Recommendations
- Zero-Liability Framework
SBP should establish a zero-liability policy for unauthorized RAAST transactions reported within 24–48 hours. This should be paired with mandatory provisional credits while disputes are under investigation, modeled on Brazil’s Pix provisional resolution mechanism, preventing liquidity loss for victims during investigation windows. This recommendation is central because it directly addresses the emotional and financial shock that follows fraud. For low-income users especially, delayed restoration of funds can produce immediate hardship even when reimbursement eventually arrives.
- Mandatory Multi-Factor Authentication
MFA should be immediately mandated for all RAAST merchant transactions above a defined threshold. Authentication requirements should be risk-based and dynamically adjusted, stricter during night-time hours or on newly registered devices. USSD-based PIN entry or biometric verification at agents should be accepted alternatives for feature phone users. The report is careful here to avoid designing a security regime only for smartphone users with seamless connectivity. Inclusion requires that stronger authentication not come at the cost of excluding users on simpler devices.
- Centralized Fraud Monitoring Database
SBP should establish and operate a centralized fraud intelligence database, equivalent to Brazil’s DICT or India’s CPFIR, aggregating suspicious transaction data, flagged accounts, mule activity, and fraud typologies. The database should be interoperable with law enforcement and NADRA for identity verification. This is a proposal with system-wide implications, because it would move Pakistan from reactive, institution-specific fraud handling toward a more coordinated national fraud intelligence model.
- Standardized Dispute Resolution Timelines
Drawing from UPI-Help and UK Financial Ombudsman standards: acknowledgment within 24 hours, investigation within 5 business days, resolution within 7–10 working days. All disputes tracked through a centralized portal with user-visible progress. SBP should flag institutions with excessive delays for regulatory action. Standardized timelines matter because predictability itself is a form of trust. Users do not only need positive outcomes; they need to know when and how those outcomes will be reached.
- Consumer Education and Protection Campaigns
A sustained, multilingual national campaign covering: how to verify payment recipients, recognize phishing scams, and initiate fraud reports. Channels should include SMS, WhatsApp, television, radio, and community engagement, segmented by user type. Campaigns must be continuous, refreshed as new scam patterns emerge. The report’s insistence on continuity is important. Fraud education cannot be treated as a one-time awareness week. Scam typologies mutate. So must the education effort.
- Regulation of AI in Fraud Prevention
SBP should issue AI governance guidelines requiring institutions to document model design choices, training datasets, and performance metrics. Mandatory third-party audits for accuracy and fairness, with human override mechanisms in disputed cases. This proposal recognizes that as fraud detection becomes more algorithmic, regulatory oversight must become more technical and more specific.
- Gender-Intentional Design Requirements
All recourse channels must be available in local languages and female-friendly formats. SBP should mandate gender-disaggregated fraud and recourse data reporting. Anti-discrimination clauses should be explicit: no user may be denied redress due to informal ID, perceived digital illiteracy, or low claim value. This recommendation pushes the system to define equity in operational rather than symbolic terms.
Implementation Roadmap
Short-Term (0–6 Months)
Mandate MFA for all RAAST participants, especially for merchant transactions above a defined threshold. This would create an immediate baseline of stronger protection, particularly for higher-risk flows.
Issue provisional credit guidelines, banks should offer provisional credits to customers reporting suspected fraud pending investigation. This would reduce the immediate economic pain of fraud and signal institutional seriousness.
Launch pilot AI-based fraud detection programs with select banks and fintechs. Pilot programs would allow model testing and performance evaluation before system-wide expansion.
Launch national consumer education campaign — targeting rural, low-literacy, and first-time users via television, radio, SMS, and social media. These channels are critical because trust-building must reach beyond the already digitized urban population.
Mid-Term (6–18 Months)
Establish centralized fraud monitoring platform, real-time aggregation of fraud reports, suspicious transaction patterns, and blacklisted accounts. A platform of this kind would begin shifting Pakistan from dispersed institutional responses to shared situational awareness.
Issue AI governance and model validation guidelines, mandatory documentation, bias testing, and audit requirements. This would help prevent the quiet normalization of opaque systems making consequential decisions.
Roll out standardized digital dispute portals, mobile-friendly, available in English and Urdu, with real-time complaint tracking. A visible, trackable portal could itself become one of the most tangible public symbols of recourse.
Long-Term (18 Months–5 Years)
Nationwide biometric integration into RAAST, working with NADRA to require biometric authentication for large-value transactions and new device registrations. If designed carefully, this could materially strengthen trust in higher-risk scenarios, though the report implicitly recognizes that privacy and exclusion risks would also need to be managed.
Continuous AI enhancement and expanded data sharing, a sector-wide working group (banks, fintechs, telcos, cybersecurity firms). This recommendation points toward a more permanent collaborative governance model rather than one-off coordination.
Comprehensive liability sharing and reimbursement standards, a 50:50 cost-sharing model between sending and receiving institutions for verified fraud victims, modeled after the UK’s 2024 mandatory APP fraud reimbursement rules. This would likely be one of the most important trust-building interventions, because it aligns incentives throughout the ecosystem.
End Notes: A Defining Moment
The report’s conclusion frames Pakistan’s current position as a genuine fork in the road. The choice is not between a fast payment system and a slow one, it is between a system that earns trust through sustained, proactive investment in consumer protection and one that achieves technical success while losing the populations it was designed to serve. This is a powerful way to end the report because it strips away the illusion that technical rollout is synonymous with policy success. Speed without protection can widen exclusion just as easily as it can reduce friction.
The global evidence is unambiguous: systems that built trust through liability clarity, centralized fraud intelligence, consumer education, and accessible recourse; Brazil’s Pix, India’s UPI, Jordan’s CliQ — have achieved durable adoption. Systems that treated consumer protection as secondary, Mexico’s early CoDi experience, the Singaporean “scamdemic”, discovered that trust, once lost, is exceptionally difficult to rebuild. The report is not simplistic here. It does not suggest that any country has solved fraud permanently. Rather, it shows that the countries most successful in sustaining adoption are those that treated trust as a continuous institutional discipline rather than a communications exercise.
SBP has a narrow window to embed the right architecture before RAAST scales. The policies chosen in the next 6 to 18 months will determine whether RAAST becomes a global benchmark for secure, inclusive real-time payments or stalls under the weight of preventable fraud and inadequate recourse. Building trust in RAAST, the report concludes, “is not a one-time initiative; it is a continuous national project, as vital to Pakistan’s financial future as infrastructure or energy policy.” That final line captures the deeper force of the document. It is not merely a payments paper. It is a warning that in the digital economy, infrastructure without trust does not scale into prosperity. It scales into hesitation.
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