IdeafintechPakistan
Recurring billing mandates for Raast
Raast moved Rs23.27 trillion in a quarter and still cannot charge a customer monthly. Build the mandate layer that lets it.
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The problem
Raast is a push rail. The payer initiates every transaction, which is fine for a shop and useless for a subscription. Every Pakistani business with recurring revenue — SaaS, gyms, insurers, streaming, schools, subscription boxes — is therefore forced onto cards, which carry interchange, sit on a minority of digital payment volume, and decline far more often than they should.
The solution
A mandate and collection layer on top of Raast: the customer authorises a recurring debit once, the merchant draws against it on a schedule, and the whole thing produces a clean audit trail and a one-tap cancellation. The hard parts are the authorisation UX, the dunning logic when a debit fails, and the regulatory conversation about what a standing consent means on an instant rail.
Who it's for
Pakistani businesses with recurring revenue: SaaS, education, insurance, healthcare plans, gyms, subscription commerce.
The market
Raast processed 742 million transactions worth Rs23.27 trillion in Q3 FY26, with 2.6 million merchants onboarded to P2M. None of that volume can currently be billed on a schedule.
How it makes money
Per-mandate fee plus a small percentage on successful collections, well below card interchange.
More detail
Raast is the most important thing to happen to Pakistani payments in a decade, and it has a hole in it that everyone building a subscription business in Pakistan runs into within a week. ## The hole Raast is a push rail. Money moves when the payer decides it moves. There is no card-on-file, no stored mandate, no pre-authorisation, and no way for a merchant to initiate a debit against a customer's account on an agreed schedule. For one-off retail that is not a problem — it is arguably a feature. For anything billed monthly it is fatal. So every Pakistani subscription business ends up on cards, which means interchange, which means a rail carrying a minority of the country's digital transactions, and a decline rate that quietly kills a meaningful share of renewals. ## What to build Three components, in order of difficulty: 1. **Authorisation.** A flow where a customer grants a merchant a recurring debit permission, with clear limits — maximum amount, frequency, expiry — and a cancellation that works in one tap and cannot be buried. 2. **Collection.** A scheduler that attempts debits, handles insufficient funds, retries intelligently rather than hammering the account, and tells the merchant what happened in terms an accountant can reconcile. 3. **Dispute and revocation.** The part that determines whether the regulator lets you exist. A standing consent on an instant rail is a consumer-protection question before it is a product question. ## Why now The merchant base arrived. Raast P2M went from 36.3 million transactions in one quarter to 55.9 million in the next, and daily volumes climbed from roughly 60,000 in June 2025 to about 1.1 million a year later, with Rs3.5 billion of State Bank subsidy behind the QR push. Those merchants are onboarded, aliased and transacting. They just cannot bill anyone monthly. ## The honest risk The State Bank could build this itself. It built the rail; mandates are an obvious extension, and a central bank that subsidised QR adoption is clearly willing to intervene in this layer. Anyone building here should assume that is possible and plan to be the software around it rather than the rail itself.
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