Pakistan's payment infrastructure underwent a genuine architectural upgrade in August 2025, when the State Bank of Pakistan launched PRISM+ â a full replacement for the country's original RTGS system, built on ISO 20022 from the ground up. Combined with Raast, the retail instant-payment system launched in 2021, Pakistan now runs on two purpose-built, modern rails rather than one legacy system patched to keep pace with instant retail volume that exploded around it.
The short version
Pakistan's payment infrastructure is operated directly by the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP):
- Raast â Pakistan's national instant payment system, launched January 2021, purpose-built for retail P2P, person-to-merchant (P2M), and bulk disbursement payments.
- PRISM+ (Pakistan Real-time Interbank Settlement Mechanism Plus) â the SBP's next-generation real-time gross settlement (RTGS) system, launched August 2025, replacing the original PRISM system.
Raast â retail instant payments, built for interoperability from day one
Raast was developed by the SBP with backing from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and World Bank support, launched by then-Prime Minister Imran Khan in January 2021. It operates on the Pakistan Faster Payment System (PFPS), letting users send and receive money via Raast IDs linked to mobile numbers and bank accounts â a free, fast, person-to-person service designed explicitly to solve the fragmentation problem where financial institutions and payment service providers historically struggled to interoperate.
- Settlement type: Real-time, individual, purpose-built retail infrastructure
- Speed: Instant, 24/7, with no cutoffs â including on bank holidays
- Value tier: Small-value retail â P2P and P2M transfers, plus bulk disbursement functionality for salaries, pensions, and government-to-person payments
- What it's used for: P2P transfers, merchant payments, bulk payroll/pension disbursements, and increasingly, government-to-person payment digitization
Raast's growth has been dramatic: in the quarter ending December 2025 alone, it processed 645.7 million transactions worth Rs 18.5 trillion, with P2P transfers averaging 7 million transactions per day (up from 3 million a year earlier) and over 2.1 million merchants onboarded to its P2M segment. The Pakistani government has identified 25 high-impact federal and provincial entities for complete Raast-based payment digitalization by December 2026.
PRISM+ â a full RTGS rebuild, launched August 2025
PRISM+ replaced the original PRISM system (which had processed transaction volumes exceeding ten times Pakistan's GDP by 2024) with a next-generation platform built on the ISO 20022 messaging standard â putting Pakistan, per SBP Governor Jameel Ahmad, among a select group of countries whose retail and large-value payment systems both run on the latest ISO standard. The 14-month project was developed with World Bank support under the Financial Inclusion and Infrastructure Project.
- Settlement type: Real-time gross settlement (RTGS) â individual, immediate, now with advanced liquidity-saving queues that let high-priority payments settle immediately while lower-priority transactions batch to reduce congestion
- Speed: Immediate, though the system retains defined daily cutoffs and operates during standard banking hours (unlike Raast's 24/7 availability)
- Value tier: High-value and time-critical â government securities settlement, interbank fund transfers, and customer transactions; in one recent quarter, government securities transactions accounted for 71% of PRISM+'s total transaction value
- What it's used for: Large corporate and interbank transfers, government securities settlement, and â notably â settlement of retail clearing batches prepared by NIFT (Pakistan's National Institutional Facilitation Technologies) for cheque and bulk retail clearing that isn't handled by Raast
PRISM+ also introduced features not present in the original system: full audit trails on every transaction, role-based access controls, real-time alerts during settlement, and the ability for banks to earmark reserves specifically for critical systems like Raast, 1Link, NIFT, or NCCPL â ensuring essential transactions aren't delayed by liquidity pressure elsewhere in the system.
Raast-Buna â Pakistan's new cross-border remittance corridor
A significant recent development: Raast has been integrated with Buna, the Arab Monetary Fund's cross-border payment platform, enabling real-time remittance flows from the Gulf directly into Pakistani rupees. This is directly relevant given Pakistan's remittance economy â worker remittances hit a record $41.6 billion in FY26, with the UAE and Saudi Arabia as the largest corridors â and represents genuine infrastructure-level integration rather than a bolt-on remittance product.
Comparison at a glance
| System | Operator | Settlement | Speed | Value tier | Typical use |
|---|
| Raast | State Bank of Pakistan | Real-time, individual | Instant, 24/7, no cutoffs | Small-value retail | P2P, P2M, bulk payroll/pension disbursements |
| PRISM+ | State Bank of Pakistan | Real-time gross settlement | Immediate (defined banking hours) | High value, time-critical | Large transfers, government securities, retail batch settlement |
What this means if you're moving money in and out of Pakistan
For most commercial activity â collecting from Pakistani customers, paying local suppliers, running payroll â Raast is now the default rail for anything retail-scale, and its rapid merchant onboarding (over 2.1 million as of late 2025) makes it increasingly viable for merchant collections specifically, not just P2P. PRISM+ becomes relevant for large corporate transfers and remains the layer where NIFT's retail clearing batches ultimately settle.
The Raast-Buna corridor is worth tracking closely for any business with Gulf-Pakistan remittance or trade exposure, since it's one of the more concrete examples in this content cluster of a domestic instant-payment system extending real-time settlement across a border through a multilateral platform rather than a bilateral bank-to-bank linkage.
