Pakistan Digital Authority has welcomed Sophia Hasnain as Chief of Staff, joining Chairperson Dr Sohail Munir and the authority’s leadership team as it continues building out the country’s digital transformation agenda. The appointment brings a figure with a mix of entrepreneurial and corporate technology experience into one of the authority’s more senior operational roles, one focused on the practical work of connecting strategy to delivery across the organization’s various initiatives.
Hasnain brings 25 years of experience transforming businesses, delivering products, and consulting on technology ventures across both emerging and developed markets. She is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Linked Things, an Internet of Things company she built from the ground up into a business working across energy management, smart industries, smart cities, and climate technology, giving her direct experience running a technology company through the full arc of building, scaling, and delivering products in competitive international markets rather than only advising on strategy from the outside.
Before founding Linked Things, Hasnain held senior positions at GSMA, Deutsche Telekom, and Telenor Pakistan, where she developed the strategy behind easypaisa digital bank, one of Pakistan’s most prominent digital financial services platforms. That background gives her direct familiarity with both the telecom regulatory environment through her time at GSMA and Deutsche Telekom, and the practical challenges of building and scaling a national scale digital financial product through her work on easypaisa, experience that maps closely onto the kind of institution building work Pakistan Digital Authority is currently undertaking.
Pakistan Digital Authority described Hasnain’s work as sitting at the intersection of strategy and delivery, an area the authority identified as particularly important for its current mandate. Officials said she has built organizations, launched national scale products, and developed thought leadership on digital financial services and innovation, characterizing her as someone who keeps a mission moving by connecting people and translating direction into concrete outcomes. The appointment adds to a series of recent additions to Pakistan Digital Authority’s leadership team, including the earlier appointment of Aalishan Akhtar as Executive Director for Digital Public Infrastructure Strategy and Lifecycle, reflecting a broader pattern of the authority building out its senior team with figures who combine private sector product experience with public sector policy backgrounds as it continues expanding its digital transformation mandate across the country.
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