Pakistan’s capital market had its best year on record for new investors, and a meaningful share of it arrived through a single digital front door.
The Central Depository Company says one in every five new stock market accounts opened in FY2025-26 came through Asaan Connect, its centralised onboarding portal. Forty-two per cent of new accounts belonged to investors aged between 18 and 30.
Set that against the year’s totals and the scale becomes clear. SECP reported the investor base rising from 392,775 accounts on 1 July 2025 to 583,052 by 30 June 2026. That is an intake of roughly 190,300 accounts and a 48 per cent increase, the largest single year the market has seen. A fifth of that puts Asaan Connect’s contribution somewhere around 38,000 accounts.
The age figure is the one that should interest anyone building for this market, and it does not rest on CDC’s word alone. SECP, reporting separately and over a different window, found that 18 to 30 year olds accounted for 45 per cent of new accounts in the first half of calendar 2026. Two institutions, two measurement periods, the same finding. The new investor in Pakistan is young, digitally comfortable and arriving in numbers the market has not seen before.
One KYC, and a Regulatory Change That Made It Stick
Asaan Connect launched in September 2023 as the Centralized Gateway Portal, built to the framework SECP set out in Circular 06 of 2023 on centralised onboarding, and was rebranded last June with a refreshed identity aimed at a more digitally native audience.
The proposition is a single KYC. An investor verifies once, then sends electronic account opening requests to any of more than 150 brokers, over 200 mutual funds across 18 asset management companies, or 19 insurance companies, without resubmitting documents at each one. Verification runs in real time against NADRA for CNIC checks, the Pakistan Mobile Database for numbers, and IBAN and email validation, with RAAST integration on the payments side.
The detail that makes the whole thing work sits in the regulations rather than on the screen. SECP designated CDC a “third party” for the purposes of the AML/CFT regulations, which means an institution receiving a profile from Asaan Connect can rely on the customer due diligence already performed rather than repeating it. That is what turns a well-designed portal into an actual shortcut. Profiles arriving through the platform need minimal further verification and can be processed on a fast track, saving both the investor and the institution time and cost.
A Coordinated Push, Not a Single Fix
Asaan Connect worked because it arrived alongside a broader set of reforms. SECP, in collaboration with NCCPL, CDC and PSX, raised the Sahulat Account investment ceiling from Rs 1 million to Rs 3 million, removed duplicate documentation requirements on bank-led account opening, introduced IBAN-based verification, and launched Minor Trading Accounts allowing under-18s to invest through a legal guardian.
Each of those removed a specific point of friction, and together they produced a year that comfortably beat anything before it. The geographic spread suggests the appetite runs well beyond the traditional centres. Karachi accounted for 25 per cent of new accounts and Lahore 16, with Islamabad and Rawalpindi at 13, Faisalabad at 4 and Multan at 3. Three quarters of the intake came from outside Karachi, which is a healthier distribution than this market has historically managed.
The Runway Ahead
Fewer than 1 per cent of Pakistanis currently participate in the capital market, which is the gap SECP Chairman Dr Kabir Ahmed Sidhu is aiming at with a stated target of 2.5 million investor accounts. He has called the figure achievable, and after a year that added 190,000 accounts the ambition looks considerably less abstract than it did twelve months ago.
The next step is already in motion. CDC’s Asaan Connect mobile app, developed under SECP’s guidance and built specifically to give younger investors a modern route into the stock market, was scheduled for launch in July 2026. If a desktop portal delivered a fifth of new accounts, a phone-native version aimed squarely at the cohort already showing up in the largest numbers has room to do considerably more.
For fintechs, brokers and asset managers building products for Pakistani retail investors, the useful signal in these figures is not just that the market is growing. It is who is joining it. A capital market whose newest entrants are overwhelmingly in their twenties is a different market to design for, and the infrastructure to reach them is now in place.
Asaan Connect is at asaanconnect.com.
Follow the SPIN IDG WhatsApp Channel for updates across the Smart Pakistan Insights Network covering all of Pakistan’s technology ecosystem.
