The Pakistan Digital Authority (PDA) engaged with more than 100 banking sector chief executives and other senior leaders in a session organized by the Pakistan Banks Association (PBA), focusing on Pakistan’s Digital Public Infrastructure with particular attention on WASL, the country’s National Data Exchange Layer. The session was led by Dr Sahibzada Ali Mahmud, Chief Digital Public Infrastructure Officer at the PDA, who presented the vision, architecture, and potential of WASL and discussed how secure, trusted, and consent based data exchange could enable new banking use cases while supporting greater access to finance across the country. He was accompanied by Aalishan Akhtar, Executive Director for Digital Public Infrastructure at the PDA, as the two officials walked banking leaders through the underlying framework the authority is building to connect financial institutions with a broader national data exchange system.
The discussion also explored international experience, including Brazil’s Open Finance ecosystem and its Pix instant payment system, drawing on the lessons those models offer for how Pakistan might develop its own digital public infrastructure. Brazil’s Pix system has become one of the most widely cited global examples of instant payment infrastructure achieving rapid, large scale adoption, and its inclusion in the session suggests PDA officials are actively studying comparable international frameworks as they shape WASL’s own rollout and the use cases it might eventually support within Pakistan’s banking sector. The comparison also points to open finance broadly, rather than just instant payments, as a reference point PDA is weighing as it works out how WASL might eventually enable more sophisticated data sharing arrangements between banks and other financial institutions.
The active participation of banking sector leaders, including their insights, questions, and proposed use cases, provided input the PDA said would help align the evolution of WASL with the actual needs of Pakistan’s financial sector, rather than developing the infrastructure in isolation from the institutions expected to eventually rely on it. This kind of direct engagement with bank CXOs marks a notable step in PDA’s broader effort to build out Pakistan’s digital public infrastructure, following earlier initiatives such as briefings with provincial governments on the Digital Nation Pakistan framework and ongoing work with NADRA on the technical build out of the data exchange layer itself. PDA thanked the Pakistan Banks Association and all participating institutions for their engagement, framing the session as part of continued collaboration as the authority works to build what it describes as an interoperable, trusted, and inclusive digital ecosystem.
WASL sits at the center of Pakistan’s broader digital governance push under the Digital Nation Pakistan Act 2025, with the PDA previously confirming that WASL’s reference architecture and accompanying instruments are publicly available through the government’s standards portal for institutions and developers looking to understand how the system is meant to function. As more than 100 digital platforms already operate nationwide across various government agencies, PDA officials have repeatedly pointed to interoperability, rather than a lack of individual digital services, as the central gap WASL is designed to close. Bringing the banking sector directly into these conversations signals that PDA views financial institutions as a key constituency for WASL’s eventual use cases, particularly around expanding access to finance through more secure and consent driven data sharing arrangements between banks and other parts of the public and private sector data ecosystem.
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