SBP issues regulations for EMIs to promote digital financial inclusion

KARACHI: State Bank of Pakistan, on Wednesday, issued revised regulations for electronic money institutions (EMIs) for enhancing outreach and scope of the innovative fintech-enabled payment companies, ARY News reported. 

As per details, the updated regulations now allow EMIs to offer their customers, including minors and freelancers, increased monthly wallet limits along with offering new payment services such as Payments Aggregation, Bill/Invoice Aggregation, Payment Initiation, Account Information, Escrow Services for domestic e-commerce transactions, Services via APIs to financial institutions (FIs), Fintechs and Third-Party Service Provider (TPSPs) and Inward cross border remittances to their customers, said a statement issued here.

There has been increasing interest by local and foreign fintech companies to work as an EMI in Pakistan since the issuance of earlier EMI Regulations in 2019 and the central bank has given approval to four EMIs to launch commercial operation to date while six EMIs were at different licensing stages.

As of March 2023, these EMIs have opened close to 1.6 million e-money wallets with a total outstanding e-money of Rs. 2 billion, the SBP spokesperson informed adding that the revised regulations were in line with SBP’s vision of encouraging non-banking fintech companies’ entry into the payments space to promote digitisation in the financial sector and accelerate level of outreach of EMI operations for achieving the objective of boosting adoption of digital financial services.

He said that the new regulations were issued after detailed consultation with existing and prospective EMIs and relevant stakeholders and they would allow customers to avail improved services from these regulated e-money providers.

He hoped that the revised regulations would attract more fintech companies from Pakistan and across the globe to enter into the EMI business in the country and provide innovative, affordable and improved payment services thus increasing digital financial inclusion in Pakistan.