Ten Years After Leaving HBL, Ghazanfar Ali Khan’s Bet on Pakistan’s Infrastructure Is Paying Off

When the news broke in 2016 that a senior HBL payments executive had resigned to start something of his own, few people knew what to make of it. Now the picture is clearer.

When the news broke in 2016 that Ghazanfar Ali Khan had resigned as Deputy General Manager of Payment Services at HBL, the story was short. A senior payments executive was leaving one of Pakistan’s largest banks to start his own fintech firm. He had identified a gap. He intended to fill it.

That kind of announcement is common enough. What happened next was not.res

Ten years on, the company Khan founded, EPL Private Limited, has since evolved into a multi-platform technology group operating across digital distribution, payments, identity verification, cybersecurity, digital learning, and Islamic digital finance. Its flagship digital distribution & payment platform “CBA” operates through more than 100,000 retail outlets across over 500 cities, processing upward of ten million transactions every month.

EPL has since become the largest distribution partner of Easypaisa and the second-largest distribution partner of NADRA Technologies Limited.

None of that was obvious in 2016. Most of it was not even imaginable. To understand the decision Khan made, it helps to recall what Pakistan’s payments landscape actually looked like when he left. The apps were coming. The funding rounds would follow. But the infrastructure underneath, the identity systems, the distribution networks, the last-mile architecture that would allow digital services to reach people beyond the major cities, was largely absent. Khan had spent four years at HBL staring directly at that absence.

During that time, he led the team that delivered Pakistan’s first biometric-based G2P disbursement system for BISP beneficiaries, a project that sounds technical until you consider what it changed in practice. Before it, beneficiaries in remote areas frequently made long journeys to collect government transfers, only to find the payments had already been claimed fraudulently in their names.

He also co-launched Pak-Identity with NADRA, enabling overseas Pakistanis to renew CNICs and NICOPs remotely using debit and credit cards without travelling back to the country. He helped integrate HBL’s branchless banking with NADRA’s eSahulat network.

The work earned international recognition, including an Asia Trailblazer Award for Best Initiative in Financial Inclusion and a shortlisting at the Smart Card and Payments Awards in the UAE.

Then he resigned anyway. “I did not leave because I was frustrated with the institution,” he said later. “I left because I could see the gaps, and waiting for someone else to fill them was not a strategy.”

What EPL has built since follows that same logic. CBA & CBA Pay focus on retail distribution, payment enablement, wallet interoperability, payment schemes and banking connectivity, operating in towns and cities where many digital platforms have limited presence. Identity360 Global addresses identity verification and KYC through decentralized, AI-driven systems. CyberCure develops AI-driven cybersecurity infrastructure centered around proactive digital defense.

Hilal Financial Services and the Pak Islamic Digital Account extend Sharia-compliant savings and SME financing onto digital rails. Keytaab focuses on digital learning and workforce development. CBA Global addresses diaspora payments and remittance corridors.

Taken individually, these are separate businesses solving separate problems. Taken together, they reflect a consistent position: that digital economies are not built through interfaces alone, and the layer most users never see is the layer that determines whether anything else holds.

Infrastructure businesses do not typically attract early recognition. The credentials that matter to them, ISO/IEC 27001 and PCI DSS certifications, PSEB and P@SHA registrations, a STZA Zone Enterprise License, rarely appear in product advertisements. They matter deeply to the regulators and institutions that have to trust a platform with real transactions at scale.

Recognition, when it came, reflected that depth. In 2025, EPL received the ASOCIO Outstanding Tech Company Award, from a federation representing technology industries across 24 Asia-Pacific economies, alongside the Outstanding Contribution to the Digital Industry Award at the Pakistan Digital Awards. EPL also organized the Annual Cyber Security Conference in Islamabad in collaboration with NADRA Technologies Limited and published a white paper on digital resilience and cyber governance.

That is a considerable distance from a news item about a banker who quit to chase a gap in payments.

Pakistan’s technology industry has spent much of the last decade celebrating its visible layer, the apps, the valuations, the growth announcements. What Khan has built sits almost entirely underneath that layer. Millions of Pakistanis access digital services through infrastructure EPL helped construct. Most of them have no idea. That is, in some ways, the point. The best infrastructure usually is invisible. The work of building it rarely makes headlines. But it tends to outlast most things that do.