Ahmed Shaami
A designer in Karachi finishes a brand identity for a local bakery. The client wants to pay in rupees, has no credit card, and the designer has no registered company and no payment gateway. Raast P2M is the rail built for exactly that gap: it is the State Bank of Pakistan’s person-to-merchant payment system, it settles instantly into an ordinary bank account, and the State Bank describes it as a facility for small merchants and self-employed individuals who previously had no way to be paid other than cash. Transactions on it climbed from 36.3 million to 55.9 million in a single quarter.
Last updated: 3 September 2026
What Raast P2M is, in one paragraph
Raast is the State Bank’s instant payment system. It has two sides that matter to you. Raast P2P moves money between two individuals, which is what most people already use when a friend sends money to a bank account using a mobile number. Raast P2M is the merchant side. It lets a business, including a very small one, present a QR code or a payment request and receive funds directly into a bank account in real time, with no card network in the middle.
The distinction matters because a P2P transfer to your personal account is a personal transfer in the eyes of your bank. A P2M collection is a business receipt. If you are trying to build a paper trail for a business, or eventually apply for anything that requires one, the second is worth more than the first.
The adoption numbers, and why they matter to you
The State Bank’s Quarterly Payment Systems Review for Q3 FY26, covering January to March 2026, gives the clearest picture available. Raast as a whole processed 742.1 million transactions worth PKR 23.3 trillion in the quarter. Person-to-person transfers made up 664 million of those. Raast P2M came in at 55.9 million transactions, up from 36.3 million in the previous quarter.
The wider context in the same report is that 3.7 billion retail payments worth PKR 168.8 trillion moved through formal channels in the quarter, and 92 percent of them went through digital channels. Mobile app payments alone accounted for 2.9 billion transactions, or 78 percent of all digital payments. The full review has the segment-level detail.
Read that as a customer behaviour fact rather than a policy fact. Your local clients are already paying for most things by phone. Asking them for cash, or for a bank transfer they have to type manually, is now the friction in the transaction rather than the norm.
How to get set up
The onboarding sits with your bank, not with the State Bank, and the exact requirements vary between institutions. The general shape is consistent.
Start by asking your existing bank whether it offers Raast P2M merchant acquiring. Not every bank has launched it, and some have launched it only for larger merchants. Several banks publish a merchant guide, for example Bank Alfalah’s Raast P2M and QR page, which is a reasonable reference point for what the process looks like even if you bank elsewhere.
Ask three specific questions before you agree to anything. What documents does the bank require from a self-employed individual rather than a registered company. What, if anything, is deducted per transaction or per month. And whether the collections land in your existing account or require a separate one. Do not assume the answer is zero cost; confirm the current schedule of charges in writing, because it changes.
Once live, you will typically have a static QR code you can print or put in a proposal, and the ability to generate a payment request the client approves inside their own banking app. For a freelancer, the payment request is usually more useful than the QR code, since most of your invoicing happens over WhatsApp or email rather than across a counter.
Does this replace Payoneer or Wise?
No, and treating it as a replacement is the most common mistake here. Raast is a domestic rupee system. It does nothing for a client in Dubai or Texas. Your international earnings still need to arrive through the channels covered in our guide to receiving international payments as a freelancer in Pakistan, and there are good reasons to keep them there, including the ability to retain a share of export proceeds in dollars through an ESFCA.
Raast P2M is for the other half of the business that most Pakistani freelancers underbuild: local clients. Local work is usually lower paid per hour, but it is also faster to win, faster to collect on, and not exposed to a single foreign platform’s policy changes. Having a clean way to take rupee payments removes the friction that stops many freelancers from taking local work seriously in the first place.
Keeping the two income streams separate
This is where people get into trouble. Foreign earnings received through banking channels are export proceeds and are documented as such, which is what makes them eligible for the concessional treatment discussed in our guide to freelancer tax in Pakistan, and what generates the reporting covered in our piece on Form R. Domestic rupee income collected over Raast is ordinary local business income and is treated differently.
Mixing them in one account does not change how each is taxed, but it makes the year-end reconstruction painful and makes it harder to produce clean evidence of your export earnings when a bank or the authorities ask for it. The practical move is boring and effective: use a separate account or at minimum a consistently labelled channel for domestic collections, and keep the export side documented on its own. If your situation is at all complicated, this is a conversation to have with a tax practitioner rather than a blog, including this one.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need a registered business to use Raast P2M?
The State Bank frames the facility as being available to small and micro merchants and self-employed individuals, but the documentation each bank asks for differs. Some will onboard a sole trader with an NTN and CNIC; others push individuals toward a business account first. Ask your specific bank before assuming either way.
How quickly does the money arrive?
Raast is an instant payment system, so settlement is real time rather than next working day. That is the main operational advantage over a manual bank transfer, which can involve the client typing an account number incorrectly and you chasing it for two days.
Can I use Raast to receive payment from a client abroad?
No. Raast operates inside Pakistan in rupees. Cross-border earnings need to come through the normal remittance and export-proceeds channels, and routing them any other way costs you the documentation that proves the income is an export.
