The Pakistan Digital Authority (PDA) hosted Umair Aijaz, Chief Executive Officer of Raqami Islamic Digital Bank, at its headquarters for a strategic engagement on Pakistan’s evolving Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) and the wider digital transformation agenda. The Raqami delegation also included Syed Abid Raza Rizvi, Chief Business Officer, Rukhsana Narejo, Chief Treasury Officer, and Shahid Yasin, Head of Liabilities, bringing a fairly senior cross section of the bank’s leadership into direct conversation with PDA officials. The meeting was chaired by Dr Sohail Munir, Chairperson of PDA, and centred on the authority’s mandate, strategic priorities, and current initiatives, giving Raqami’s team a direct briefing on where PDA’s broader digital infrastructure plans currently stand.
Discussions covered building out national digital infrastructure, promoting interoperability, enabling secure and inclusive digital services, and building collaboration between the public and private sectors, touching on themes that have run through PDA’s other recent engagements with banking sector stakeholders, including its earlier session briefing more than 100 banking CXOs on WASL, the National Data Exchange Layer. The delegation and PDA also explored areas of mutual interest in digital financial services, innovation, and technology-enabled solutions, framed within the context of an integrated and citizen-centric digital ecosystem. Bringing a digital bank specifically into these conversations gives PDA a chance to understand how a Shariah-compliant, fully digital retail bank views the practical implications of DPI initiatives like WASL for its own operations and customer facing services.
For Raqami, which was granted a commercial license by the State Bank of Pakistan in May 2026 and has since positioned itself as Pakistan’s first fully Shariah-compliant digital retail bank, engagement with PDA offers an opportunity to align its own technology roadmap with the direction national digital infrastructure is heading. Raqami has previously said it plans to build a technology platform supporting open APIs and banking-as-a-service capabilities aimed at enabling collaboration with fintech firms, telecom operators, and other partners, an approach that could benefit directly from closer alignment with PDA’s interoperability focused infrastructure like WASL. PDA’s engagement with Raqami adds a specific digital bank to what had previously been a broader banking sector consultation, suggesting the authority may be moving from general sector briefings toward more targeted conversations with individual institutions about how DPI tools intersect with their specific business models.
PDA described financial services as the point where digital public infrastructure stops being an architecture diagram and starts being something a citizen actually uses, framing the Raqami meeting as part of its continued commitment to engaging with industry in support of a secure, interoperable, and inclusive digital ecosystem for Pakistan. As PDA continues building out WASL and other components of the country’s Digital Public Infrastructure under the Digital Nation Pakistan Act 2025, sessions like this one with individual digital banks will likely serve as a mechanism for identifying practical use cases and implementation details that broader, larger scale banking sector briefings may not surface as directly. Whether this specific engagement with Raqami translates into concrete technical integration or collaboration in the near term will likely depend on how quickly both organizations move from strategic discussion toward specific pilot projects or data sharing arrangements.
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