Pilot operations approval from SBP

Some announcements and what this means: 

Pilot Approval

We are pleased to announce that we have received pilot approval from the State Bank of Pakistan. The pilot approval has been granted based on Safepay fulfilling the State Bank of Pakistan’s stringent criteria. The final stage is a commercial license, which is subject to SBP’s satisfactory assessment of pilot operations. The pilot approval allows Safepay to proceed with onboarding merchants and scale its operations

Fintech is a regulated space globally, and a business in a regulated space requires licensing from the regulating body of the country it is operating in. Why is financial regulation important? It is what keeps financial institutions in a country operating smoothly, it also protects the financial and economic stability of a country, and safeguards consumers of financial institutions. Regulators such as the State Bank of Pakistan that operate as the Central Bank of the country, give a financial business such as ours approval once it has fulfilled rigorous criteria including governance, risk control and consumer protection. Once approved, a regulated entity is monitored to ensure compliance  of the rules and systems in place. 

What we have been up to:

In 2019, Safepay set out to empower Pakistani businesses by making online payments simpler with cutting edge technology, security and a better user experience. Our team wants to make a meaningful impact in Pakistan, and we want to do this by solving what we believe is an essential problem. After going through Y Combinator in the summer of 2020, we raised funding, put our services offline and decided to go down the path of regulation, and to make the right partnerships that would allow us to scale and help every Pakistani business accept digital payments with ease. 

In the past 22 months, we have been hard at work setting the stage for our next act. We have pursued regulation with the State Bank of Pakistan and gone through the lengthy process of getting to where we are - pilot approval. We have formed  meaningful partnerships with institutions such as Visa’s Cybersource, Euronet and UBL. We have also partnered with other fintechs in the market such as Avanza Payfast, NIFT, Easypaisa, Abhi and plan to collaborate with many more as the ecosystem grows. We want a Pakistani business to only have to integrate with Safepay, and with that single point of integration unlock various payment methods, such as debit and credit cards locally or internationally, bank transfers and mobile wallets. 

We raised a bridge round and added some great investors to our cap table such as RaliCap , i2i Ventures and The Fintech Fund. These investors are incredible and we are grateful to be a part of their portfolios. We have also grown our team to manage the scale we plan to operate in. We have added engineers who are excited about solving the problems businesses face and making it easier for them to manage payments. 

We want to hear from you:

If you are a business in Pakistan who wants to accept digital payments, we want to hear from you. You can email us on support@getsafepay.com or sign up for our waitlist. You can sign up and integrate with our sandbox environment, and look at the documents required to onboard with us to submit our merchant onboarding form. We can only offer our services to a limited number of merchants at this time, but we are open for business and will get to you in due time. 

Why do we have a waitlist? 

The pilot stage of regulation by the State Bank allows us to onboard a certain number of merchants. However, we will vet your application, communicate with you while you’re on our waitlist and take you live as soon as we can.

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We are inspired by  the amazing work Pakistani businesses are doing, how they have shown resilience during hard times. We want to make the payments part of operating a business in Pakistan simpler, and allow the incredible businesses in this country to join the global economy, one digital payment at a time. 

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