JazzCash has crossed 250,000 women freelancers and entrepreneurs managing their finances on the platform, with the company targeting 300,000 by the end of 2026. Speaking at SheMatters Lahore, Zainab Samantash, Head of Legal Affairs and Company Secretary at JazzCash, noted that women’s formal financial access in Pakistan has grown to over 50 percent.
She said the industry needs to move beyond access as the primary metric. “The more honest conversation is what happens after the account is opened. Many women still transact through a husband’s or brother’s account. Many have a wallet they’ve never used. At JazzCash, we have moved our focus from access-led inclusion to agency-led inclusion.”
Zainab identified three compounding barriers holding back adoption among women. The first is device access. Without a phone, no product or onboarding process bridges the gap. The second is relevance. Most financial products were originally built around a male, salaried, formally employed user, which does not reflect how a large proportion of women in Pakistan earn and spend. Informal work, irregular income, and seasonal patterns require a different product logic entirely.
The third barrier is harder to quantify. “Even women who have accounts often do not feel those accounts are really theirs to use without permission or explanation. That is cultural, yes, but it is also a product design issue,” she said.
To address these gaps, JazzCash has built two distinct interventions. The JazzCash Women Account offers zero fees, CNIC-based sign-up, and savings features designed around irregular income cycles. Alongside it, the company has deployed a women agent model, training women to serve as financial service touchpoints within their own neighbourhoods. “A lot of women are more comfortable transacting with another woman, particularly in smaller towns and rural areas. It solves an access problem that product design alone cannot fix,” Zainab said.
On the freelancer opportunity specifically, she pointed to a broader market reality. Pakistani women freelancers have in some surveys outearned their male counterparts internationally. The constraint is not skill or output but infrastructure: receiving cross-border payments, managing income that does not arrive on a fixed schedule, and building savings without a conventional salary structure. The Women Account was designed with exactly this profile in mind.
She also spoke about the enabling role of regulation more broadly. The State Bank’s Banking on Equality framework, Raast as public infrastructure, and the government’s cashless economy agenda have created a policy environment that gives private sector initiatives room to scale. “These are the reasons someone in a village actually puts their money into a system they have never used before.” she said.
Echoing Zainab’s views, Murtaza Ali, CEO of JazzCash, said: “Empowering women remains at the heart of our mission. We remain committed to enabling more women to participate, grow, and lead in the digital economy. The infrastructure is in place, the regulatory direction is clear, and the demand is real. What we build from here has to reflect the lives women actually live, not the ones products assume they live.”