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1LINK wants PayPak on every government salary. Should it get it?
The August 2026 proposal would move enormous volume onto Pakistan's domestic card scheme by mandate. The industrial logic is sound. The consumer-choice question is real.
By the FounderDuels team ·
In August 2026, 1LINK put a proposal into public debate: make PayPak cards mandatory for government salary accounts, subsidy programmes, social safety-net disbursements and mass-transit payment systems.
The stated purpose is explicit — cut Pakistan's reliance on Visa and Mastercard. It is worth taking that argument seriously, and then taking the objections just as seriously.
The case for
It is a foreign-exchange argument. Every domestic transaction routed over an international scheme sends scheme fees out of the country, in dollars, forever. For an economy with Pakistan's external-account constraints, that is not a rounding error, and it is the same reasoning that produced RuPay, Mir, Troy and Elo elsewhere.
It is a sovereignty argument. A national payments system that depends on two foreign companies for domestic retail payments has a single point of failure that is not under national control. Countries that have discovered this the hard way did not enjoy it.
It is a scale argument. PayPak's problem is not issuance, it is usage — a quarter of the country's 53 million debit cards, about 6% of card spending. Government salary and disbursement volume is high-frequency, predictable, and exactly the kind of flow that turns a dormant card into a used one.
The case against
It does not obviously fix the usage problem. Mandating issuance produces more cards. PayPak already has more cards than it has usage. If mandated cards behave like existing mandated-adjacent cards — issued with a basic account, used at an ATM, otherwise dormant — then the card count rises, the usage share does not, and the scheme's actual weakness is obscured by a better headline number.
It applies the compulsion to the people with the least leverage. Government employees have some choice. Recipients of subsidy and social safety-net payments largely do not. A policy whose burden falls hardest on the people who cannot opt out deserves a higher standard of justification than a general efficiency argument, and that justification has not really been made in public.
It removes the pressure to compete. A scheme that wins volume by mandate has less reason to improve acceptance, dispute handling, fraud protection or international reach. The honest version of the PayPak growth story is that it should win on product — cheaper for merchants, credible for consumers, backed by the coming domestic credit card — and mandates are a way of not having to.
The Apple Pay connection
There is a version of this where the two stories reinforce each other. If PayPak is genuinely supported in Apple Wallet — and the iOS 27 beta strings suggest Apple has at least done the engineering — then a mandated PayPak card is no longer only an ATM card. It becomes a tap-to-pay instrument on the device the holder already carries.
That is the outcome 1LINK should want, and it is a far better answer to the 6% problem than compulsion is. It is also not in 1LINK's control, and it depends on Apple choosing to support a domestic scheme at launch rather than after it — which, in India, it did not.
What to watch
Whether the mandate proposal gets regulatory traction, whether the PayPak credit card actually ships in 2026 as 1LINK has said it intends, and whether PayPak's share of card usage moves off 6%. That third number is the only one that settles the argument.
Sources
- Electronic payments reach 3.7b transactions — The Express Tribune
- Raast: Pakistan's Instant Payment System — State Bank of Pakistan
- PayPak — 1LINK
- 1LINK proposes mandatory PayPak cards for govt salaries — Profit by Pakistan Today
- EBANX advances emerging market infrastructure with Pakistan expansion in motion — GlobeNewswire
- Countries and regions that support Apple Pay — Apple Support
Published by FounderDuels. Corrections: [email protected]
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