The IPO Pakistan Has Not Seen Yet

By Omair Ansari, Co-Founder & CEO & Ali Raza Ladhubhai, Co-Founder, ABHI

ABHI started in 2021 with eight of us in one shared room and little else, chasing a question that seemed obvious once said out loud: why should someone who has already earned their salary wait until payday to touch it? Plenty of people told us it wouldn’t work, that a small Pakistani fintech had no business fixing something banks hadn’t bothered to. That became Earned Wage Access anyway, then payroll lending, then working capital for small merchants. A few years in, we bought a struggling microfinance bank, a move not seen by a fintech in Pakistan, but it has been done abroad. We inherited real depositors, real branches and a real turnaround, not just a product roadmap, and it took the better part of two years to get the institution healthy again. A listing can look, from the outside, like a tidy ending. It has not felt tidy from the inside.

ABHI Microfinance Bank holds a microfinance banking licence in Pakistan, branch and branchless, run with the speed and discipline of a technology company rather than a traditional branch network. We are a technology company with a finance license, not the other way round. Gold-backed lending is our largest business today, alongside earned wage access, payroll lending, merchant and SME finance, deposits and payments. None of that existed as one platform five years ago, and it isn’t the end of the list. This listing will be the first of its kind on the Pakistan Stock Exchange, though we don’t think that makes us more than the company that arrived first, with a lot of help and no shortage of luck.

We do think about Brazil a lot. When Nubank (Brazil’s largest digital bank) listed in 2021, it wasn’t only one company’s exit. Investors who had mostly overlooked Latin American fintech had a real reference point for what a digital-first bank could be worth at scale. In the years after, it got easier for other Brazilian fintechs to raise capital and be taken seriously, simply because Nubank had gone first and the model survived scrutiny. A market that could have quietly rooted for Nubank to stumble instead treated its success as proof the whole sector deserved a second look.

Brazil isn’t the only case. Kaspi.kz’s listing did something similar for how global investors saw Kazakhstan, a market few outside the region were watching before. In India, PB Fintech’s listing gave insurance-tech an early benchmark, though Paytm’s rockier debut the same year is a reminder that a listing doesn’t automatically clear the way for others. It can, but doesn’t have to. What seems to matter most is whether an ecosystem treats a peer’s success as shared progress, or something to pick apart.

None of this happens alone, either. The State Bank of Pakistan, the Pakistan Stock Exchange and the Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan have all worked through a listing this market hadn’t seen before, without a template to follow, and taken it seriously. We are extremely thankful for their support.

We don’t know if this listing will do for Pakistan what Nubank did for Brazil, or Kaspi did for Kazakhstan. That isn’t ours to decide. What we know is that five years ago we were eight people arguing about salary access, with more doubters around than believers, and this is the next chapter of the same argument at a bigger scale. If it helps someone else raise their next round, or convinces a regulator that a model like ours can work, that will matter more than the listing itself. We could use more of that instinct here: backing people trying something hard, instead of waiting to see them fail. Investing in Abhi Microfinance Bank is not backing the end of the story, it’s getting exposure for the next leg of our growth. The best is yet to come.