Pakistan’s First Digital Bank to Start Operations in June

The Islamabad-based fintech startup, TAG Innovation Pvt., will start operations this month as Pakistan’s first digital bank.

The fintech will begin with a limited number of customers and will start to scale up commercially within the next two to three months, its Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Talal Gondal said in an interview with Bloomberg.

This is a notable achievement as 70 percent of the adult population of Pakistan is still without bank accounts. According to the World Bank, Pakistan has about 100 million adults who do not have bank accounts.

ALSO READ

GSMA Innovation Fund Grants Rs. 146 Million to 3 Startups

For the startup itself, this is also a massive accomplishment as it was able to raise nearly $5.5 million in pre-seed funding, which makes it one of the top five startups of the sort in the MENA region, according to Crunchbase.

The funding round was led by Quiet Capital Management and Liberty City Ventures. TAG also received strategic angel investments from the general partners of Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures LLC, Canaan Partners, and Mercury’s Immad Akhund, the news report added.

Gondal said that the company aims to have millions of customers in the first few years, adding that “In Pakistan, the system is broken. Some banks don’t even have a banking app. It’s that bad”.

ALSO READ

JBS Becomes Pakistan’s first VMware Principal Partner in Datacenter Virtualization

He revealed that TAG plans to simplify the process by enabling its potential customers to get their accounts within three minutes with just a copy of their national identification card and a photograph.