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What Apple Pay would mean for JazzCash and Easypaisa
Pakistan's two big wallets did not win by being the best card experience. They won by serving people cards never reached — which is why Apple Pay is not aimed at them.
By the FounderDuels team ·
Whenever Apple Pay is rumoured for a market, the local mobile wallets are declared to be in trouble. In Pakistan that means JazzCash and Easypaisa, and the claim deserves more scrutiny than it usually gets.
They are not the same product
Apple Pay is a way to present a card you already have. It does not hold a balance, does not do cash-in or cash-out, does not disburse salaries, and is useless to someone without a bank card.
JazzCash and Easypaisa are branchless banking. Their core proposition has been a stored balance, an agent network for cash conversion, bill payment, and remittance — for tens of millions of people whose relationship with the formal banking system was thin or non-existent. That is a different business built for a different customer.
A product that requires an iPhone and a card is not competing for the customer who walks to an agent with cash.
Where they do overlap
At the top of the wallet user base — urban, salaried, smartphone-owning, bank-account-holding customers — the overlap is real. That customer can pay by wallet QR, by card, or, if Apple Pay lands, by phone-tap. For them, Apple Pay is a genuine competitor for the checkout moment.
That is a small, valuable slice. It is also the slice where the wallets earn the least, because those users hold low balances in the wallet and treat it as a payment rail rather than an account.
The bigger threat is not Apple
It is Raast.
Raast P2M grew from 36.3 million transactions in one quarter to 55.9 million in the next, reached 2.6 million merchants by March 2026, and daily P2M volumes went from roughly 60,000 in mid-2025 to about 1.1 million a year later — with a Rs3.5 billion State Bank subsidy behind the QR push.
Raast is free, national, bank-account-native and state-backed. It does, at merchant checkout, exactly what a wallet QR does, without the wallet. If anything commoditises the payment layer that JazzCash and Easypaisa built their merchant proposition on, it is that — and it is already happening, at scale, right now.
The strategic read
The wallets' defensible ground is everything Apple Pay does not do: agent networks, cash handling, credit and lending, insurance, savings products, merchant working capital, and serving the customer who is not on an iPhone. Their exposed ground is being a payment button, and it is being competed away by the central bank rather than by Apple.
There is also a straightforward opportunity here. EBANX's September 2026 announcement that it is entering Pakistan — integrating JazzCash and Easypaisa alongside Raast, and bringing Apple Pay decryption in-house — is a signal that the international payments infrastructure layer now treats Pakistani wallets as endpoints worth supporting. That is distribution the wallets did not have to build.
For founders
If you are building on Pakistani payments, do not model Apple Pay as a replacement for wallets. Model it as one more credential in a stack you will have to support all of anyway: Raast QR, wallet balances, card-on-file, and possibly a tokenised card in a phone.
The Pakistani checkout is not consolidating. It is getting more crowded.
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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