IdeafintechPakistan

Working capital underwritten on Raast transaction data

2.6 million merchants now generate verifiable daily revenue records for the first time. Lend against them.

Former founder · September 30, 2026

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The problem

Pakistani small merchants have been structurally unbankable because they could not prove revenue. No books, no receipts, no verifiable cash flow — so no credit, or credit at informal rates that make growth impossible.

The solution

Underwrite short-term working capital against observed Raast P2M inflows, with repayment taken as a share of daily settlement. The data that makes this possible did not exist two years ago.

Who it's for

Small and micro merchants transacting daily on Raast QR: food, pharmacy, general stores, salons, repair shops.

The market

More than 2.6 million merchants onboarded or alias-registered on Raast P2M by March 2026, with daily P2M transactions up from roughly 60,000 to about 1.1 million in a year.

How it makes money

Fixed fee per advance, repaid as a percentage of daily settlement over a short term.

More detail

The single most valuable thing Raast created is not the payments. It is the record. ## What changed A merchant taking QR payments generates a timestamped, bank-verified, un-fakeable stream of revenue data. Before Raast, a small Pakistani merchant's revenue was cash and therefore invisible, which is the actual reason they could not borrow — not risk appetite, not interest rates, but the absence of anything to underwrite against. By March 2026 more than 2.6 million merchants were on Raast P2M, and daily transaction volumes had gone from about 60,000 to roughly 1.1 million in twelve months. That is a population with a credit file for the first time. ## The product Short-duration working capital — thirty to ninety days — sized off trailing settlement volume and repaid as a percentage of each day's inflow. The merchant never faces a fixed instalment on a bad week, which is what breaks small-merchant lending everywhere. ## What makes it hard **Data access.** You need the merchant's consent and a legitimate route to their settlement history. Whether that route exists cleanly is the first question to answer, before anything else. **Licensing.** Lending in Pakistan is regulated. This is not a product you launch and regularise later. **Adverse selection.** The merchants who want capital most urgently are not the ones you want. The defence is that you can see the revenue, which is precisely the advantage the data gives you. ## Why it is worth the difficulty Every large merchant-payments company in the world eventually becomes a lender, because payments margins are thin and lending margins are not. In Pakistan the payments margin is being deliberately compressed towards zero by the central bank. Lending is where the business is.